Fifty years ago, mother of four young children, Charlotte Johnson marked the end of her treatment at the Maudsley Hospital with an exhibition of the 78 paintings she had created in the eight months she spent incarcerated there. 

She was being treated for OCD, then little-understood and called obsessional complulsive neurosis. She had electro-shock therapy and a form of aversion therapy.  At her discharge, she told the medical team, it hadn’t worked. But she had been able to paint. 

Her works are now gathered again for an exhibition, What It Felt Like, in the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, based on the site of the UK’s oldest residential psychiatric hospital, Bethlem Royal Hospital. 

In a Times review Nancy Durrant describes her as “a skilful, expressive painter. Using a distinctive palette of greys, pinks, blues and oranges with heavy black outlines, she draws out the emotion in every scene with economy: anxiety etched in just a few lines on the faces of her children; quick rage or disengaged despair on those of fellow patients.”

Her daughter, journalist Rachel Johnson was only 8 when her mother was admitted to the South London psychiatric hospital, the Maudsley Hospital; her three brothers ranged through 9 year old Boris, to Leo, 6, and  Jo, 2. I interviewed her last week for a CPD with Welldoing therapists and she spoke about her memories of her late mother’s struggle with mental health.

Although she studied for a degree at Oxford in the 60s, she married Stanley Johnson before graduation and by the time she was 30 she had four young children. “But, she found it all too much. Our father didn’t do domesticity and he travelled a lot in the developing world for work, while she was in a cottage on the family farm, with no help, no washing machine, no car and at the end of a two-mile mile dirt track that she had to walk up and down twice a week to take us to be driven by a neighbour to school.”

After a move to Brussels, with her marriage increasingly rocky, she could cope no longer, so she checked herself into the Maudsley.  Says Rachel Johnson, “She hated the therapies, particularly the primitive forms of aversion therapy. She would leave her room and come back to find it all messed up and dirty. They’d have daub her room with things like honey, urine, faeces.”

Rachel Johnson believes that some of her mother’s treatment may have made her worse. “But it gave her relief from domesticity, and time to paint. We always accepted that painting was like oxygen to her. But when she returned to us, we could see she was still very ill."

After the Maudsley stay, her marriage broke up, and eventually she remarried. Rachel Johnson believes this marriage, to American academic Nicholas Wahl made her very happy, but also recalls “I think it was formative for all of us. Many people have written how politicians have absent parents. Our sense of responsibility was flipped at a very early age. We knew we had to look after her.”

Looking back, at the paintings and her mother’s life, Rachel Johnson feels enormous empathy for her mother’s situation. “She was a very neat, tidy, ordered person, and living with children must have been so hard. At the show we heard that she had talked to her doctors about when Alexander (Boris’s first name) and I took off Leo’s nappy and daubed the playroom with its contents. We were very naughty and active; we weren’t trying to be evil. It must have been accumulation of such things that tipped her over.” 

Her mother Charlotte Johnson Wahl died, at 79, three years ago. She never recovered from OCD, and also had Parkinson’s, and “right to her dying day she couldn’t leave something on a table if it wasn’t straight. Even if she knew it was dangerous [to get out of her wheelchair] but couldn’t stop it.”

Rachel Johnson told me, “She really was the love of my life and I think my brothers would say the same. She was so vulnerable and open about her problems and I always desperately cared about her wellbeing.”

What It Felt Like: the Maudsley Hospital paintings by Charlotte Johnson Wahl is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind

Open to the public Wed-Sat, 9.30am-5.00pm, until March 29 2025.