Deinstitutionalisation and mental health activism in Australia: emerging voices of individuals with lived experience of severe mental distress, 1975–1985

Abstract

Starting in the 1960s, large numbers of patients in Australia’s mental hospitals were released even though hardly any support services were available in the community. By the 1970s, a small number of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, volunteers, and consumer advocates were building alliances and coalitions with each other and with politicians and health bureaucrats to realise change. Using archival records and interviews as sources, we analyse how, in the early 1980s, Simon Champ, Meg Smith, and Janet Meagher, three pioneering Australian consumer advocates, started to speak out and influence discussions about mental health policy. They were also invited to join boards of non-government organisations in mental health care, foreshadowing later developments. Today, the participation of consumers of mental health care in mental health services is taken for granted and mandated, and most services have consumer advisory groups.

Keywords:

• Community mental health
• New South Wales
• non-government organisations
• consumer advocates

Acknowledgements

We thank Janet Meagher, Simon Champ, Meg Smith, Robert Ramjan, Gemma Smart, and Stephanie Oak for comments on previous drafts. We also wish to express our gratitude to the whole research team for their input and continuous inspiration: Asha Zappa, Carla Gaskin-Charles, Eloise Watts, Georgia Valis, Holly Kemp, Ian Shoebridge, Lewis Gould-Fensom, Roslyn Burge, Ruah Potaris Grace, Samantha Baker, and Tina Kenny.

For updates on our research, see the website for Re; Minding Histories: https://www.remindinghistories.net.

Disclosure statement

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

About the authors

Robyn Dunlop is a writer who received her PhD from the University of Newcastle in 2021. She researches late-twentieth century mental health histories with a focus on New South Wales, Australia. An article from this research was published as ‘Mental Health as History: Psychiatry, Community, and General Practice,’ Health and History 21, no. 2 (2019). She has previously worked as an institutional historian and as an editor in a research institute in Papua New Guinea. This is her second PhD; her first explored how traumatic pasts were being negotiated by Australian researchers (English, University of Adelaide, 2004).

Hans Pols is professor at the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is interested in the history of medicine, focusing on the history of psychiatry and mental health. His research has focused on Indonesia and Australia. With respect to Indonesia, he focuses on the history of colonial medicine and the transformation of medicine during the process of decolonisation. His monograph Nurturing Indonesia: Medicine and Decolonisation in the Dutch East Indies, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. With respect to Australia, he is currently involved in a project on the history of community mental health.

Notes

1 Simon Champ, in Re;Minding Histories, ‘Mental Health from the Ground Up: Pioneering Consumer Activists Who Changed Mental Health’, 11 September 2021, 00:59, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh0Cx3C9Cz0, accessed 1 December 2021.

2 Ibid.

3 Meg Smith, ‘Interview’, by Paul Rhodes and Gemma Lucy Smart, Oral History Project on the History of Community Mental Health in Australia, 5 August 2020, 34:38.

4 Janet Meagher, ‘Interview 1’, by ARC Research Group on the History of Community Mental Health in Australia, Oral History Project on the History of Community Mental Health in Australia, 8 July 2020, 38:35.

5 Ibid.

6 For example, Holly Kemp, in Re;Minding Histories, ‘Mental Health from the Ground Up’, 01:12.

7 Janet Meager, in Re;Minding Histories, ‘Mental Health from the Ground Up’, 35:38.

8 Brian Bromberger and Janet Fife-Yeomans, Deep Sleep: Harry Bailey and the Scandals of Chelmsford (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991).

9 ‘Mary O’Hagan Appointed to Key Lived Experience Leadership Reform Role’, Mental Health Reform: Victoria State Government, updated 12 November 2021, https://www.mhrv.vic.gov.au/news/mary-ohagan-appointed-key-lived-experience-leadership-reform-role, accessed 12 November 2021; Penny Armytage et al., Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System, 5 vols. (Melbourne: Victorian Government Printer, 2021).

10 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1988 [1961]); Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Hammondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1968); Thomas S. Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York: Hoeber-Harper, 1961); Thomas S. Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1970).

11 See, for example, Nikolas Rose, The Psychological Complex: Social Regulation and the Psychology of the Individual (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).

12 Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (New York: Routledge, 2006), xxviii.

13 A major influence in social history was E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963). In the history of medicine, this approach was encouraged by Roy Porter; see his ‘The Patients’ View: Doing Medical History from Below’, Theory and Society 14 (1985): 175–97.

14 See, for example, David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little Brown, 1971); Andrew Scull, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Allen Lane, 1979); Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London: Athlone, 1987).

15 For various examples from the UK and Ireland see David Wright and Peter Bartlett, Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History of Care in the Community, 1750-2000 (London: Athlone, 1999).

16 Hans Pols, ‘“Beyond the Clinical Frontiers”: The Mental Hygiene Movement in the United States’, in International Relations in Psychiatry: Britain, Germany, and the United States to World War II, ed. Volker Roelcke, Paul J. Weindling and Louise Westwood (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2010), 111–33.

17 The process of deinstitutionalisation and its consequences for the mental health professions and individuals with a lived experience of distress has not received sufficient attention by historians. But see, for example, Andrew T. Scull, Decarceration: Community Treatment and the Deviant, A Radical View (New York: Polity Press, 1984); Despo Kritsotaki, Vicky Long and Matthew Smith, ed., Deinstitutionalisation and After: Post-War Psychiatry in the Western World (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

18 See, for example, Kristie Dodson, ‘Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing’, Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011): 236–57.

19 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.

20 Co-production has become an innovative approach in mental health research. See, for example, Cath Roper, Flick Grey and Emma Cardogan, ‘Co-Production: Putting Principles into Practice in Mental Health Contexts’ (2018), https://healthsciences.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/3392215/Coproduction_putting-principles-into-practice.pdf, accessed 1 December 2021.

21 Stephen Garton, Medicine and Madness: A Social History of Insanity in New South Wales, 1880-1940 (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1988), 18–20, 28.

22 ‘The Mental Hospitals Services of New South Wales [Editorial]’, Medical Journal of Australia 1, no. 9 (27 February 1954): 819–20.

23 Alan Stoller and K. W. Arscott, Report on Mental Health Facilities and Needs of Australia (Canberra: Government Printing Office, 1955), 162.

24 Rob Barclay and Philip Mitchell, ‘Doctor Helped Psychiatry Shed Dickensian Reputation [Obituary Bill Barclay, 1930-2020]’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 July 2020, https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/doctor-helped-psychiatry-shed-dickensian-reputation-20200714-p55buz.html, accessed 1 December 2021.

25 See, for example, David R. Morgan, ‘The Combined Use of Chlorpromazine and Reserpine in the Treatment of Chronic Mental Illness: A Preliminary Report’, Medical Journal of Australia 2, no. 3 (1955): 77–80; and an editorial in the same issue: ‘Chlorpromazine, Reserpine and Chronic Mental Illness [Editorial]’, Medical Journal of Australia 2, no. 3 (16 July 1955): 99–101.

26 David R. Morgan, ‘The Use of Reserpine, Chlorpromazine and Allied Drugs in Medicine and Psychiatry’, Medical Journal of Australia 1, no. 25 (1956): 1029–35.

27 John F.J. Cade, ‘Lithium Salts in the Treatment of Psychotic Excitement’, Medical Journal of Australia 2, no. 10 (1 Sept 1949): 349–52. See also Greg De Moore and Ann Westmore, Finding Sanity: John Cade, Lithium and the Taming of Bipolar Disorder (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2016).

28 This connection is explicitly made in Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley, 1997), 246–55. The most outspoken critique of this argument is provided by Andrew T. Scull; see his ‘The Decarceration of the Mentally Ill: A Critical View’, Politics and Society 6, no. 2 (1976): 173–212; and Scull, Decarceration.

29 See, for example, the policy document by C. J. Cummings: Health Advisory Council of NSW, ‘Interim Report on Preventive Psychiatry in New South Wales’, Medical Journal of Australia (12 August 1961): 280–2. See also the annual reports by William A. Barclay, the director of state psychiatric services of New South Wales: William A. Barclay, Annual Report of the Director of State Psychiatric Services for the Year Ended 30 June 1963 (Sydney: Parliament of New South Wales, 1964) and following years.

30 In 1975, the number of ex-psychiatric patients housed in nursing homes was equivalent to 40% of the total number of beds in mental hospitals; 24% of all nursing home patients were ex-psychiatric patients or individuals with intellectual impairment. Concetta Rizzo et al., A Study of Nursing Homes in New South Wales (Sydney: Health Commission of New South Wales, 1976), 1.

31 N. Shiraev, Psychiatric Statistics II: Recent Trends in Public Psychiatry in New South Wales (Sydney: Health Commission of NSW, 1979), 31. See also C. J. Cummins, A History of Medical Administration in New South Wales, 1788-1973 (Sydney: Health Commission of NSW, 2003).

32 N. Shiraev, Psychiatric Statistics I: Notes Towards a History of Public Psychiatry in New South Wales (Sydney: Health Commission of NSW, 1979), 23; Shiraev, Psychiatric Statistics II, 13–4, 18–21.

33 Rizzo et al., Nursing Homes NSW, 34.

34 From Ingrid Reynolds and A. Fleming, A Study of Nursing Homes (Sydney: Gladesville Hospital, 1973), 44; cited in Rizzo et al., Nursing Homes NSW, 44.

35 ‘The Mental Hospitals of New South Wales [Editorial]’, Medical Journal of Australia [MJA] (18 March 1939): 797.

36 Ron Barr and Gordon Parker, ‘The Effects of Discharge on Long-Stay Psychiatric Hospital Patients’, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 9, no. 1 (1975): 47–9; Gordon Parker and Ron Barr, ‘The Exodus of Long-Stay Psychiatric Patients’, Medical Journal of Australia 62, 1, no. 26 (1975): 801–3. See also Maree Flaherty, Bruce Flaherty, and Gordon Parker, ‘A Comparative Study of Long-Stay Psychiatric Patients Discharged to Boarding Houses and Sattelite Houses’, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 11 (1977): 193–5.

37 Laurie Young and Tina Ermoll, The Experience of Psychiatric Hospitalization: An Evaluation Based on Interviews with Inpatients (Sydney: Health Commission of New South Wales, 1975), 18.

38 Matina Pentes, ‘Interview’, by Roslyn Burge and Hans Pols, Oral History Project on the History of Community Mental Health in Australia, 5 November 2020, 03:11. Note that Tina Ermoll and Matina Pentes are the same person.

39 Michelle Arrow, The Seventies: The Personal, the Political and the Making of Modern Australia (Sydney: NewSouth, 2019).

40 For a discussion of the Australian Assistance Plan in the Hunter-Newcastle Region and broader reflections on regionalism, see Erik Eklund, Melanie Oppenheimer and Joanne Scott, ‘“Developing a Community Soul”: A Comparative Assessment of the Australian Assistance Plan in Three Regions, 1973-1977’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 62, no. 3 (2016): 419–34.

41 Anne-Marie Boxall and James Gillespie, Making Medicare: The Politics of Universal Health Care in Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2013). See also Frances Baum, Denise Fry and Ian Lennie, ed., Community Health: Policy and Practice in Australia (Sydney: Pluto Press for Australian Community Health Association, 1992).

42 Mental Health and Related Services Assistance Act 1973, No. 154 of 1973 (assented to 27 November 1973).

43 Hospitals and Health Services Commission, Review of the Community Health Program: Report from Hospitals and Health Services Commission (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1976), 21.

44 Hospitals and Health Services Commission, Review, 2, 88.

45 ‘“Medical Consumers” Enter Public Health Fray’, Tribune (Sydney), 31 July 1973.

46 Jan Patterson, ‘Consumers and Complaints Systems in Health Care’ (PhD thesis, University of Adelaide, 1996), 94, 96–7.

47 Paul Laffey, ‘Antipsychiatry in Australia: Sources for a Social and Intellectual History’, Health & History 5, no. 2 (2003): 17–59.

48 For the proceedings see N. McConaghy, Liberation Movements and Psychiatry (Sydney: Ciba-Geigy, 1974).

49 Sasha Soldatow, ‘Psychiatric Liberation’, Camp Ink 3, no. 6 (1974): 6–7.

50 Robin Winkler, A Critique of Aversion Therapy for Homosexuals (Sydney: Sydney Gay Liberation, 1972).

51 Robin Winkler, ‘Research into Mental Health Practice Using Pseudopatients’, Medical Journal of Australia 61, 2, no. 11 (1974): 399–403. Winkler replicated Rosenhan’s experiments as reported in D.L. Rosenhan, ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places’, Science New Series 179, no. 4070 (19 January 1973): 250–58. It has recently been revealed that Rosenhan’s experiment was (mostly) fraudulent: see Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission that Changed Our Understanding of Madness (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2019).

52 Alan Owen and Robin Winkler, ‘General Practitioners and Psychosocial Problems: An Evaluation Using Pseudopatients’, Medical Journal of Australia 61, 2, no. 11 (14 Sept 1974): 393–98. The same issue contained a strongly worded editorial condemning both articles as unscientific: Neil McConaghy, ‘Pseudopatients and Evaluation of Medical Practice [Editorial]’, Medical Journal of Australia 61, 2, no. 11 (1974): 383–85.

53 McConaghy, ‘Pseudopatients’.

54 Smith, in Re;Minding Histories, ‘Mental Health from the Ground Up’, 09:59.

55 Meagher, ‘Interview 1’, 38:35.

56 Janet Meagher, ‘Witness Statement of Janet Meagher AM’, Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System (1 July 2019). See also Bianca Hall, ‘“There Were Monsters”: Mental Health Advocate Pleads for Real Change’, The Age, 3 July 2019, https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/there-were-monsters-mental-health-advocate-pleads-for-real-change-20190703-p523om.html, accessed 1 December 2021.

57 Abuse in mental health facilities has been documented in Jane Davidson, Every Boundary Broken: Sexual Abuse of Women Patients in Psychiatric Institutions (Sydney: Women and Mental Health, 1997).

58 Meagher, ‘Interview 1’, 38:35.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 Meagher, ‘Witness Statement’, 3. Janet Meagher, ‘Interview 1’, 38:35.

62 Janet Meagher, Partnership or Pretence: A Handbook of Empowerment and Self Advocacy (Sydney: Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association, 1995), 6.

63 ‘The Council for Mental Hygiene for New South Wales’, Medical Journal of Australia 1, no. 22 (1932): 780. On ARAFMI see the New South Wales Association for Mental Health Newsletter, issue 10/11 of 1978. The NSW Association of Mental Health is now known as Way Ahead.

64 Margaret Lukes, The ARAFMI Story: A Decade of Support 1975-1985 (Sydney: ARAFMI, 1985). Soon after its founding in Sydney, chapters were established in other cities, states, and overseas. In New South Wales, ARAFMI is now known as Mental Health Carers NSW. Organisations like these had been active before; see, for example, Nicholas Hervey, ‘Advocacy or Folly: The Alleged Lunatics' Friend Society, 1845-63’, Medical History 30, no. 3 (1986): 245–75.

65 Judith Godden, Aftercare: Our Journey 1907-2017 (Sydney: Aftercare, 2017). Aftercare recently renamed itself ‘Stride’.

66 Jon Chesterson, Sacha Maller, and Bunty Turner, PRA: The Story, Celebrating 50 Years (Sydney: Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association, 2005).

67 For an inside history see C. B. Keogh, GROW Comes of Age: A Celebration and a Vision! (Sydney: GROW, 1979).

68 Janet Meagher, ‘Interview 2’, by Hans Pols, Oral History Project on the History of Community Mental Health in Australia, 9 October 2020, 29:21.

69 ‘From the Executive Secretary’, New South Wales Association for Mental Health Newsletter, no. 3 (March 1981): 2. Meagher joined the board of the NSW Association in 1981. On Scott-Orr and community mental health see: Robyn Dunlop, ‘Mental Health as History: Psychiatry, Community, and General Practice’, Health & History 21, no. 2 (2019): 1–22.

70 Donald Scott-Orr, ‘Interview’, by Robyn Dunlop and Hans Pols, Oral History Project on the History of Community Mental Health in Australia, 27 October 2020, 29:27.

71 Meagher, ‘Interview 2’, 35:45.

72 ‘Stigma and Mental Illness: IYDP Project’, New South Wales Association for Mental Health Newsletter, no. 3 (March 1981): 10–11.

73 Janet Meagher, ‘Psychiatric History and Tenancy: A Personal Tale of My Experience’, New South Wales Association for Mental Health Newsletter, no. 10 (1982): 3.

74 ‘Schizophrenia Self Help Group’, New South Wales Association for Mental Health Newsletter, no. 1 (1983): 4. Newsletter of the Schizophrenia Self-Help Group, April 1983, from the collection of Janet Meagher.

75 Janet Meagher, in Re;Minding Histories, ‘Mental Health from the Ground Up’, 17:38.

76 Ibid.

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid.

79 Meagher expected that the presence of peer workers in mental health services would be an improvement. See Janet Meagher, Anthony Stratford, Fay Jackson, Erandathie Jayakody and Tim Fong, ed., Peer Work in Australia: A New Future for Mental Health (Sydney. Richmond PRA and Mind Australia, 2018).

80 Matt Watson and Ella Legg, The History of Richmond Fellowship of NSW and the People Who Made it Happen (Sydney: Richmond PRA, 2015), 13. Similarly, Anne Deveson—whose son was diagnosed with schizophrenia and whose family experienced the lack of support services—followed the example of National Schizophrenia Fellowship, established in the UK in 1972, and stimulated the establishment of similar associations in Australia. For an autobiographical account see Anne Deveson, Tell Me I’m Here: One Family’s Experience of Schizophrenia (Ringwood: Penguin, 1991).

81 The founder of the Richmond Fellowship in the UK was Dutch theology student Elly Jansen. The houses the Fellowship operated were run as therapeutic communities. For reports on its various initiatives see Elly Jansen, ed., The Therapeutic Community: Outside the Hospital (London: Croom Helm, 1980).

82 Watson and Legg, History Richmond Fellowship NSW. For the history of therapeutic communities see Catherine Fussinger, ‘“Therapeutic Community”, Psychiatry’s Reformers and Antipsychiatrists: Reconsidering Changes in the Field of Psychiatry after World War II’, History of Psychiatry 22, no. 2 (2011): 146–63.

83 Robert Ramjan, ‘Interview, 1 Nov. 2019’, by ARC Research Group on the History of Community Mental Health in Australia, Oral History Project on the History of Community Mental Health in Australia, 1 November 1999, 04:06.

84 Andy Campbell, ‘Interview’, by Leila Cheikh, Hans Pols and Ian Shoebridge, ARC Research Group on the History of Community Mental Health in Australia, 11 June 2021, 03:05. Campbell was chairman of the Board of the Richmond Fellowship of NSW for over thirty years. See also Simon Champ, ‘Interview’, by Anthony Harris, Tina Kenny and Hans Pols, Oral History Project on the History of Community Mental Health in Australia, 25 September 2020, 02:41; Ramjan, ‘Interview, 1 Nov. 2019’, 1:21:22.

85 Ramjan, ‘Interview, 1 Nov. 2019’, 40:06.

86 Simon Champ, in Re;Minding Histories, ‘Mental Health from the Ground Up’, 09:59.

87 Ibid.

88 Champ, ‘Interview’, 01:50.

89 Ibid., 02:41.

90 Ibid.

91 Ibid.

92 Ibid., 17:34. For a research paper Champ wrote for his course see: Simon Champ, ‘The Colour of Dinosaurs and the Flight of a UFO’ (Graduate Diploma Research Paper, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, 1993). Personal collection of Simon Champ.

93 Simon Champ, ‘A Most Precious Thread’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Mental Health Nursing 7, no. 2 (1998): 54.

94 Champ, ‘Most Precious Thread’, 54.

95 Champ, ‘Most Precious Thread’, 55.

96 The Victorian association had been established in 1978. See Catherine Waterhouse, The Schizophrenia Fellowship of Victoria, 1978-1999: A Brief History (Melbourne: SFV, 1999). For the New South Wales counterpart, see Virginia Macleod, From Seed to Sunflower: A History of the Schizophrenia Fellowship of New South Wales, 1985-2010 (Sydney: Schizophrenia Fellowship of NSW, 2010).

97 Robert Ramjan, ‘Interview 2’, by Anthony Harris, Tina Kenny and Hans Pols, Oral History Project on the History of Community Mental Health in Australia, 4 September 2020, 00:51.

98 Anne Deveson, Spinning Out (Australia: National Film and Sound Archive, 1991), https://video-alexanderstreet-com.ezproxy.sl.nsw.gov.au/watch/spinning-out.

99 Champ, ‘Interview’, 32:21.

100 ‘Interim Report on Phone-in Survey on Psychiatric Services’, New South Wales Association for Mental Health Newsletter, no. 1 (Jan 1983): 2-3. See also David T. Richmond, ‘Interview’, by ARC research group on the History of Community Mental Health in Australia, Oral History Project on the History of Community Mental Health in Australia, 12 November 2020; David T. Richmond, Inquiry into Health Services for the Psychiatrically Ill and Developmentally Disabled [Richmond Report], 4 vols. (Sydney: Department of Health, NSW, 1983).

101 Meg Smith in Re;Minding Histories, ‘Mental Health from the Ground Up’, 12:17.

102 Ibid.

103 Smith, ‘Interview’, 05:51.

104 Smith in Re;Minding Histories, ‘Mental Health from the Ground Up’, 12:17.

105 Ibid., 31:30.

106 Ibid., 25:01.

107 Smith, ‘Interview’, 03:42.

108 Ibid., 36:49.

109 Meg Smith, ‘Detained, Diagnosed, and Discharged: Human Rights and the Lived Experience of Mental Illness in New South Wales, Australia’, in Mental Health and Human Rights: Vision, Praxis, and Courage, ed. Michael Dudley, Derrick Silove and Fran Gale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12.

110 Meg Smith, ‘Community Development and Self Help Groups for People with Serious Mental Illness’, Network: Newsletter of the Board of Community Psychologists 8, no. 2 (1993): 1–12.

111 Meg Smith, ‘MAD: Manic and Depressive Sufferers Group’, New South Wales Association for Mental Health Newsletter 1 (Jan 1981): 7.

112 Smith in Re;Minding Histories, ‘Mental Health from the Ground Up’, 25:01.

113 The Third MD Papers: A Collection of Personal Accounts, Information and Sundry Items About Living with Mania and Depression (Sydney: Depressive and Manic Depressive Association of NSW, 1986). The Fourth MD Papers appeared in 1992.

114 Smith, ‘Community Development’, 4.

115 Meg Smith, ‘How it All Started’, in The Fourth MD Papers (Sydney: DMDA, 1992), 3.

116 Smith, ‘Community Development’, 7. See also Ingrid Weddell and Meg Smith, ‘Running a Support Group: Some Ideas for Starting a Group for People Who Have a Mood Disorder’, in The Fourth MD Papers (Sydney: DMDA, 1992), 34–7.

117 Alan Owen, ‘Self Help Approaches in Health Care’, Social Alternatives 1, no. 2 (1978): 5-7.

118 Smith, ‘How it All Started’, 2.

119 Smith, ‘How it All Started’, 3.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was financially supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council entitled The Development of Australian Community Psychiatry after 1970 [DP190103655] awarded to Hans Pols, Paul Rhodes, and Anthony Harris (University of Sydney), and Catharine Coleborne (University of Newcastle).