Saint Richard's Asylum

Saint Richard's Asylum is a psychiatric hospital in Tiegang, International Mandate. It is located in the Blackfriars district, close to Blackfriar's International Station, Blackfriars' Redux and the School of the High Inquisitor of Tiegang. It is notable as the originator of the Ricardian science.

Founded in 1692 by adherents of the Anti-Hyperborean school of psychiatry, it is known for its heavily anti-medical view on mental illnesses. As such, the Asylum disavows all kinds of medication for its residents (as patients are called here). Instead, the Asylum believes in behaviour activation and modelling as proper treatments for all mental ailments. Being part of society is crucial to keep away unhealthy psychological factors, and as such, alcohol (in moderation) is celebrated for its salutogenic properties.

Residents are kept active in helping out in local bakeries (particularly Nikola's Bakery), and carpentry workshops, as well as attending and organising to the business of the Asylum itself. People who have psychological problems are obviously experts on those problems themselves, which is why physicians are banned from the premises of the Asylum other than for actual somatic reasons.

Residents of the Asylum has also found themselves valuable in attending to plumbing and hygienic management of the less civilised areas of the city, and it has been reported that the residents are particularly celebrated there as they appear too dumb too understand what's going on (which is of course a fat lie, as the residents do speak of finding half-dissolved corpses in fatbergs, though police have not taken these stories seriously as they are told by "the mentally ill"). In 1700 AN the Asylum received ten "Lyrican" youths from the Southern District of Hurmu. Indentured to the Hurmu Constabulary, these seven year-olds had been turned away from the School of the High Inquisitor of Tiegang on account of their youth. It had been a bureaucratic oversight, the age of enrolment at the school was nine, but the Apprentice Constable charged with delivering them to the school felt obliged to report his success to his superiors on his return. A task that would have been more difficult with a gaggle of children still in tow. To that end he struck up a conversation with a porter from the Asylum, whom he encountered whilst despondently in his cups amidst the squalid splendour of the Blackfriars' Redux. For a portion of the fee that would have been paid to the school for the enrolment of all the pupils, the porter undertook to surreptitiously enlist the ten as his "apprentices". They could then take on some of the more onerous tasks the Asylum contracted to its patients. In return, the porter mentioned that some of the inmates were possessed of a delusion whereby they delighted in awarding titles, dignities, and positions to themselves, and while this was pathetic some of them had become quite adept that crafting certificates that looked passingly official to the untrained eye. In this manner the "graduation" of the youths could be attended to when the time came. The Apprentice Constable, when he voiced the concern that it might be taken ill if Vanic brats were discovered squatting outside the ][Blackfriar's International Station]], was answered by the - considerably inebriated - landlord from behind the bar. The bearded bloated puce-faced horror, slurring his words terribly as he spilt his drink whilst in the midst of gesturing theatrically with it, blathered that the cellars beneath the Inn were such a perception distorting warren, that the "little shits" could hide down there and he'd forget that they were even there, especially if they made themselves useful by collecting empty glasses after hours and beating back the encroaching tendrils which had colonised the urinals. In such a manner did the Asylum conduct its business with the neighbouring establishments.

One notable experiment conducted at the asylum involved trapping a dozen inmates in a sealed room, setting pen and paper before them and instructing them to write out their imaginings of a fictitious world and the countries to be found therein. The initial efforts were collated and graded. Thereafter any scribbler whose writing was observed to have deviated from what had been previously established was administered an electric shock to encourage their return to the baseline narrative. The process was repeated day and night over the course of several days, until at last some of the more susceptible began to experience confusion as to the status of their own present reality. These individuals, once identified, were taken and handed over to the anatomists and the keepers of the measuring instruments for further study.

Thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of the Asylum's residents, it is a fine self-funded commercial enterprise. Its surplus is re-invested in the Asylum's business.

The Asylum is named after Saint Richard, a Nazarene patron saint of the disadvantaged and outcasts of society.

Ricardian Academy for Foundlings

From 1708 AN onwards the grounds of the asylum would play host to the Ricardian Academy for Foundlings, an educational institution for abandoned children, orphans, and other wards of the city.

Impact on the Blackfriars' district

While Saint Richard's promoted an ethos of reintegrating residents into society, this had unintended consequences in the surrounding Blackfriars' district of Tiegang. Many outpatients from the asylum could frequently be found wandering the streets in various states of delusion and mania. Some formed roving bands that would accost pedestrians with paranoid rants or engage in public disturbances.

This situation was exploited by the Regiment of the Blackfriars', a local mercenary company. The regiment's recruiters would actively "purchase into service" any unattended asylum outpatients they could capture. Using a mixture of coercion, bribes and predatory indenture contracts, the unwell individuals were essentially press-ganged to serve as expendable manpower for the regiment's security details and off-the-books operations. The permissive climate towards the asylum's "patients at large" provided a steady supply of these mentally unstable conscripts to fuel the Blackfriars' ranks and unsavory enterprises throughout Tiegang's underworld.