"This edited collection of interdisciplinary chapters offers new and innovative perspectives on mental health and illness in the past and covers a breadth of opinions, views, and interpretations from patients, practitioners, policy makers, family members and wider communities." (Filippo M. Sposini, H-Madness, historypsychiatry.com, April 21, 2021)
1 Voices in the History of Madness: An Introduction to Personal and Professional Perspectives
Part I Shifting Perspectives in the Industry of Madness
2 Accepted and Rejected: Late Nineteenth-Century Application for Admission to the Scottish National Institution for the Education of Imbecile Children
3 Mental Health in the Vernacular: Print and Counter-Hegemonic Approaches to Madness in Colonial Bengal
4 “The Root of All Evil is Inactivity”: The Response of French Psychiatrists to New Approaches to Patient Work and Occupation, 1918–1939
5 Distant Voices: Treatment of Mentally Ill Children at the Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark, c. 1935–1976
Part II Reconstructing Patient Perspectives
6 Experiences of the Madhouse in England, 1650–1810
7 “Tells his Story Quite Rationally and Collectedly”: Examining the Casebooks of the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, 1890–1910, for Cases of Delusion Where Patients Voiced their Life Stories
8 Dehumanizing Experience, Rehumanizing Self-Awareness: Perception of Violence in Psychiatric Hospitals of Soviet Lithuania
9 “I Like My Job because It Will Get Me Out Quicker”: Work, Independence, and Disability at Indiana’s Central State Hospital (1986–1993)
10 “More than Bricks and Mortar”: Meaningful Care Practices in the Old State Mental Hospitals
Part III The Visual and the Material
11 Tracking Traces of the Art Extraordinary Collection
12 Patient Photographs, Patient Voices: Recovering Patient Experience in the Nineteenth-Century Asylum
13 A Boundary Between Two Worlds? Community Perceptions of Former Asylums in Lancashire, England
Part IV Mad Studies and Activism
14 Brutal Sanity and Mad Compassion: Tracing the Voice of Dorothea Buck
15 Mad Activists and the Left in Ontario, 1970s to 2000
16 Knowing Our Own Minds: Transforming the Knowledge Base of Madness and Distress
17 Making Public Their Use of History: Reflections on the History of Collective Action by Psychiatric Patients, the Oor Mad History Project and Survivors History Group
18 Often, When I Am Using My Voice… It Does Not Go Well: Perspectives on the Service User Experience
19 Coda: Speaking Madness: Word, Image, Action
20 Correction to: Mental Health in the Vernacular: Print and Counter-Hegemonic Approaches to Madness in Colonial Bengal
Rob Ellis is a Reader in History and the author of London and its Asylums, 1888-1914: Politics and Madness (2020). He has published widely on the histories of mental ill-health and learning disability and has co-produced a range of impact and engagement projects that have emphasized their contemporary relevance.
Sarah Kendal is a Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK. She has a clinical background and has published widely on mental health and illness. Her interests include current practice and how that can be informed by the past.
Steven J. Taylor is a Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Kent, UK, and author of Child Insanity in England, 1845-1907, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. His research explores ideas and constructions of childhood health, lay and professional diagnoses, ability and disability, and institutional care.
This book presents new perspectives on the multiplicity of voices in the histories of mental ill-health. In the thirty years since Roy Porter called on historians to lower their gaze so that they might better understand patient-doctor roles in the past, historians have sought to place the voices of previously silent, marginalised and disenfranchised individuals at the heart of their analyses. Today, the development of service-user groups and patient consultations have become an important feature of the debates and planning related to current approaches to prevention, care and treatment. This edited collection of interdisciplinary chapters offers new and innovative perspectives on mental health and illness in the past and covers a breadth of opinions, views, and interpretations from patients, practitioners, policy makers, family members and wider communities. Its chronology runs from the early modern period to the 21st century and includes international and transnational analyses from Europe, North America, Asia and Africa, drawing on a range of sources and methodologies including oral histories, material culture, and the built environment.
Chapter 4 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.