The Symposium Showed Us Two Things: Mental Health History Ventures Out Of The Asylum

Mental healthcare has long since moved away from the asylum model.

The documents in the Mind archive are the fuel for new stories about mental health, about power, resistance, healing, abuse, continuity and change.

The symposium showed us two things. How an important part of that new history therefore the Mind archive shall be an important, unavoidable staging post in British histories of mental health. Although, the final session of the day provoked a lively discussion about the place of oral testimony in the history of mental health.

From there, the discussion began to revolve around how far survivors’ testimonies should’ve been collected and recorded in archives.

Taylor was questioned by Andrew Roberts, a mental health survivor, activist and historian, about the significance of her own ‘personal archive’ of journals and notebooks.

Professor Barbara Taylor’s personal testimony of being a psychiatric inpatient throughout the last years of Friern Hospital in the late 1980s was the jumping off point for discussion. On 26 June the Wellcome Trust played host to a symposium on the history of 20th century mental healthcare in Britain -Keeping Mental Health in Mind. You will receive a confirmation email shortly. Please follow the link in the email to confirm your registration. For historians of psychiatry, it created practical problems, there’s a heated debate about the success of this policy. It’s an interesting fact that the traditional source base for the history of mental healthcare ceased to exist as the hospitals closed. Nonetheless, whenever as indicated by Sophie Corlett, s Director of External Relations, the charity and its federated local branches comprise the ‘second largest’ provider of mental health services in the country.

That’s where the Mind papers come in.

Did you know that the history of psychiatry in Britain resembles its primary sources, as Dr Rhodri Hayward stressed in amongst the morning’s presentations.

The most powerful point to emerge from the day was how the Mind archive could prompt, support and feed into alternative kind of British history of mental health. Until recently the dominant sources was those produced by the grand Victorianera asylums. Remember, while rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside, health Minister Enoch Powell to the NAMH Annual conference in 1961 described asylums as isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic ‘water tower’ and chimney combined. We’re talking about undoubtedly valuable and can tell us much about the practice of inpatient mental healthcare.

Throughout the 20th century there was a dramatic shift away from the asylum as the central plank in mental health provision.