Main description:

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 twenty-first 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.

Contents:

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