[1] The building is a freestanding 41 bay, 3 storeyed psychiatric hospital built on twenty-five acres of land purchased in 1848 for £829 which eventually opened as the Mullingar District Lunatic Asylum on 23 August 1855.

The structure was built to designs by John Skipton Mulvany, possibly the most celebrated architect operating in Ireland at the time.

[7][8] Julia Caffrey Leonard, a housekeeper from nearby Trim, County Meath, was admitted into the hospital after she threw hot tea on her husband during an argument as she suspected him of adultery.

Bird's Nest Soup, a book written by Hanna and published in 1971, captured the haunting detail of other's lives stripped of human rights of "the unloved, social outcasts, the incurably embittered and the dispirited".

[14][15] In 2007, the Inspector of Mental Health Services report created a horrific picture of the appalling conditions which some residents have to endure in ageing psychiatric hospitals around the country.

—Inspector of Mental Health Services Report, 2007[16]In 2016, a Medical Council inquiry had found a junior doctor, Dr Muthulingam Kasiraj, also known as Dr Sripathy, who had worked as a senior house officer at St Loman's Psychiatric hospital for a period of approximately six months between July 2013 and January 2014, guilty of poor professional performance on several counts.