The Mental Hospital and Institutional Workers' Union was a trade union in the United Kingdom.
The union was established as the National Asylum Workers' Union in 1910 by asylum attendants in Lancashire. George Gibson became its General Secretary in 1912, and served in post for the remainder of the union's existence.
In 1916, the union lost its membership in Southern Ireland to the Irish Mental Hospital Workers' Union. In 1931, it changed its name to the "Mental Hospital and Institutional Workers Union".
In 1946, the union merged with the Hospital and Welfare Services Union to form the Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE). By this stage, it had secured a very high membership amongst mental hospital staff, including the vast majority of mental hospital nurses
Famous quotes containing the words mental hospital, mental, hospital and/or union:
“Home is my Bethlehem,
my succoring shelter,
my mental hospital,
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my husband, my sir,
my womb, my skull.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The church is a sort of hospital for men’s souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailor’s Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Should the German people lay down their arms, the Soviets ... would occupy all eastern and south-eastern Europe together with the greater part of the Reich. Over all this territory, which with the Soviet Union included, would be of enormous extent, an iron curtain would at once descend.”
—Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945)