From the margins: madness and history in Australia

Abstract

This Introduction situates the Australian scholarship on the histories of mental illness, madness, psychiatry and institutions in a wider perspective. It argues for the relevance and importance of histories of madness in our present.

Keywords:

• Mental health
• colonial
• historiography
• confinement
• institutions
• lived experience
• climate change

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The use of the term ‘madness’ is deliberate and derives from recent interventions in critical disability studies with the reclaiming of the term to embrace people with service-user, survivor, consumer and lived experiences of mental illness over time. See Catharine Coleborne, Why Talk About Madness? Bringing History into the Conversation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 2–5.

2 ‘Burden: Mental Health’, World Health Organization, accessed 13 December 2021, https://www.who.int/health-topics/mental-health#tab=tab_2.

3 ‘Youth and Mental Health’, Black Dog Institute, accessed 13 December 2021, https://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/research-areas/youth-mental-health/.

4 Catharine Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–1910 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2015), 2–3.

5 James Dunk, Bedlam at Botany Bay (Sydney: NewSouth, 2019).

6 Stephen Garton, Medicine and Madness: A Social History of Insanity in New South Wales, 1880-1940 (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1988).

7 Mark Finnane, ‘Asylums, families and the state’, History Workshop Journal 20, no. 1 (1985): 134–48; David Wright, ‘Getting out of the asylum: Understanding the confinement of the insane in the nineteenth century’, Social History of Medicine 10, no. 1 (1997): 137–55.

8 Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, ed., ‘Madness’ in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press/API Network, 2003).

9 See also Lee-Anne Monk, Attending Madness: At Work in the Australian Colonial Asylum, Clio Medica 84: The Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008).

10 Katie Holmes, ‘Talking about Mental Illness: Life Histories and Mental Health in Modern Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (2016): 25–40.

11 Corinne Manning, Bye-bye Charlie: Stories from the Vanishing World of Kew Cottages (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008).

12 David Wright, ‘Learning Disability and the New Poor Law in England, 1834–1867’, Disability & Society 15, no. 5 (2000): 731–45; Mental Disability in Victorian England: The Earlswood Asylum, 1847–1901 (Clarendon, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001); David Wright, Downs: The History of a Disability (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

13 See for instance ‘Beyond Borders’, A Virtual Issue of Social History of Medicine: https://academic.oup.com/shm/pages/beyond-borders-virtual-issue.

14 See Catharine Coleborne and Peter N. Stearns, ‘Institutional records: A comment’, in Sources for the History of Emotions: A Guide, ed. Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Peter N. Stearns (London, UK; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020); Catharine Coleborne, ‘Families, patients and emotions: Asylums for the insane in colonial Australia and New Zealand, 1880s–1910’, Social History of Medicine, 19, no. 3 (December 2006): 425–42.

15 Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen is writing a new book, Making Mental Health: A Global History, which will develop these ideas in more depth.

16 See ‘Pictures of Madness’, History Council of NSW, 9 September 2020, https://historycouncilnsw.org.au/events/pictures-of-madness/.

17 ‘Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond’, The Vacuum Cleaner, http://www.thevacuumcleaner.co.uk/bedlam-asylum-and-beyond/. See also James Leadbitter, ‘The lunatics are taking over the… means of production: 5 years of Madlove by the Vacuum Cleaner’, Asylum 27, no. 1 (2020), https://asylummagazine.org/2020/03/the-lunatics-are-taking-over-the-means-of-production-5-years-of-madlove-by-the-vacuum-cleaner/.

18 Brenda LeFrançois, Robert Menzies and Geoffrey Reaume, eds., Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies (Toronto: Toronto Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2013).

19 Caroline Hickman et al., ‘Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey’, Lancet Planetary Health 5, no. 12 (1 December 2021): e863–73, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00278-3.

20 Isabel Whitcomb, ‘Is It Time to Abandon the Term “Climate Anxiety”?’, Yes! Magazine, 31 August 2021, https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2021/08/31/climate-anxiety-mental-health.

21 Glenn Albrecht, quoted in Whitcomb, ‘Is It Time to Abandon the Term “Climate Anxiety”?’.

22 S. Weintrobe, Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 241.

23 Panu Pihkala, ‘Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Eco-Anxiety and Climate Anxiety’, Sustainability 12, no. 19 (2020): 7836.

24 Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville R. Ellis, ‘Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss’, Nature Climate Change 8, no. 4 (2018): 275–81; Ashlee Cunsolo, Sherilee L. Harper, Kelton Minor, Katie Hayes, Kimberly G. Williams and Courtney Howard, ‘Ecological grief and anxiety: the start of a healthy response to climate change?’, Lancet Planetary Health 4, no. 7 (July 2020): e261–63, e262.

25 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

26 Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York: Viking Penguin, 1994).

27 Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1955).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catharine Coleborne

Catharine Coleborne is a Professor and Head of the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her books include Why Talk About Madness? (2020) and Insanity, Identity and Empire (2015). She has published articles in journals including Australian Historical Studies, Social History of Medicine and Medical History.

James Dunk

James Dunk is a Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. In his research, writing and teaching he works between the history of medicine, health and psychology and the environmental humanities.