However, the very existence of this regularly run tour raises serious concerns about ‘dark tourism’ and the need to respectfully handle a historical site’s devastating past. No matter how tastefully it is done, can a ghost tour of a former asylum ever be an appropriate method of generating greater interest in local history?

When US musician Mariah Carey was diagnosed with bipolar back in 2001, she feared it would end her career. Over the following seventeen years she worried that someone would ‘expose’ her secret. Stigma concerning mental illness is real; although Carey’s one of the most successful performers of all time, she was still unable to talk about her diagnosis.

The woman I knew best, of course, was my own mother. I could see my hips, legs and breasts becoming hers, and I heard her every self-abasement as my own. She’d take up walking regimes, or cut out bread for a month, and then on weeknights I’d come into the kitchen to find she’d caved and drunk an entire bottle of white wine. It was a cliche, a stock-standard Electra complex, but there was no way in hell I was going to become her.

‘[I]n evaluating any given person,’ Allen Frances writes in his book Saving Normal, ‘we lack a general definition of mental disorder to help us decide whether he is normal or a patient, mad or bad.’ The admittedly porous, but nonetheless vitally important line between mental illness and mental health has been one of the threads in my academic work for the last couple of years, so it is with growing wariness and frustration that I have been watching the debate on Donald Trump’s mental health play out.

All my doctors counsel me against being open about having a serious mental illness. Finding ways to massage the truth to people – and explain away periods of absence from the workforce – has become second nature to me. But, as a gay man who has been open and proud about his sexuality, I can’t help but feel a bit conflicted. Is the counselling to stay secret actually denying people their proper supports in society and jeopardising mental health?

Popular culture has long touted the link between creativity and mental illness. The image of the tortured artist is a trope: a highly unstable individual, buzzing with mania and turmoil that is released periodically through art and placated perpetually through substance abuse. This image draws our compassion as well as a dark fascination. We have been conditioned to view the suffering of artists romantically, because we equate madness with genius.

There were about five other women there – each with two kids of their own – and I knew them all. I knew that each was sharp, brilliant and creative. I was filled with horror, and something of grief, that they were being subjected to any of this, were bound to it and by it. My ears rang, my heart pounded and the room closed in around me. Let’s get out of here I wanted to urge them, let’s leave the kids and run.

To be ‘burnt out’ suggests that one was alight in the first place, when in fact, the six months prior to finally admitting to myself that I was not fit to work were characterised by a marked absence of vitality usually associated with fire. After only four years of teaching, I felt less like a too-short wick end and more like the smoke that trails after: diffuse and aeriform.