Co-producing madness: international perspectives on the public histories of mental illness

Abstract

Public engagement is increasingly seen as an expected part of the armoury of the twenty-first century academic. With increased scrutiny on the humanities, stemming from a neo-liberal critique of their value, it appears to offer a relatively straightforward opportunity to demonstrate the real-world application of research beyond the ivory towers of academia. For historians of madness and mental ill health, the links between their findings and the issues faced by service-users in the here and now are clear. This article, however, offers a critical reflection of both the challenges and opportunities of partnership working. Starting with examples of the longer-term willingness of academics to engage with a wider public, co-produced initiatives from Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom are used to examine the changing shape of academic study and how that aligns with trends in public history, museum development and public policy. The article suggests a series of methodological and theoretical interventions in light of decades of service-user and lived experience engagement with historical research and writing. It provides an overview of the often hidden and overlooked challenges of partnership working, including the place of patient and service user ‘voice’, and touches on the ethical implications of doing so. Rather than seeing potential partners as ‘end users of research’, we highlight the learning opportunities that arise from new ways of working, as well as emphasising the significant contribution that historical knowledge and expertise can bring to co-produced outputs.

Keywords:

• Public history
• madness
• co-production
• museums
• mental health

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank James Dunk and the two anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

About the authors

Rob Ellis is a Reader in History at the University of Huddersfield, UK. He has published widely on the histories of mental ill-health and learning disability and has co-produced and co-curated a range of impact and engagement projects that have emphasized their contemporary relevance.

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.

Notes

1 Catharine Coleborne, Why Talk About Madness? Bringing History into the Conversation (Cham: Palgrave, 2020), 31.

2 See Coleborne, Why Talk About Madness?

3 Robert Ellis, Sarah Kendal and Steven J. Taylor, ‘Voices in the History of Madness: An Introduction to Personal and Professional Perspectives’, in Voices in the History of Madness: Personal and Professional Perspectives on Mental Health and Illness, ed. Robert Ellis, Sarah Kendal and Steven J. Taylor (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 13.

4 See Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, ed., Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); Amy Jane Barnes, ‘Forum: Museums and Mental Health’, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 2, no. 1 (2014): 133–35.

5 Catharine Coleborne, ‘Mental Health and the Museum: Institutional Spaces for Memories and Interaction’, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 2, no. 1 (2014): 162–66.

6 In the United Kingdom, the UPP Civic University Commission was launched in 2018. See ‘UPP Foundation launches the “Civic University Commission”’, last modified 20 March 2018, https://www.upp-ltd.com/upp-foundation-launches-the-civic-university-commission/. In Australia, a broad engagement with the concept of the ‘civic university’ has been evident in national sector debates about the role of the university in the regions. Understanding the role of the university as leading change and community regeneration through education and research has been adopted by discourses of leadership and management in the higher education sector.

7 Beth Maloney and Matt D. Hill, ‘Museums and Universities: Partnerships with Lasting Impact’, Journal of Museum Education 41, no. 4, (2016): 247–49. Leonie Hannan, Rosalind Duhs and Helen Chatterjee, ‘Object-based Learning: A Powerful Pedagogy for Higher Education’, in Museums and Higher Education Working Together, ed. Anne Boddington, Jos Boys and Catherine Speight (London: Routledge, 2016), 159–69.

8 Solveig Jülich and Sven Widmalm, ‘Introduction: audiences and stakeholders in the history of medicine’, in Communicating the History of Medicine. Perspectives on Audience and Impact, ed. Solveig Jülich and Sven Widmalm (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 2.

9 Jülich and Widmalm, ‘Introduction’, 4. See also Sally Sheard, ‘History Matters: The Critical Contribution of Historical Analysis to Contemporary Health Policy and Health Care’, Health Care Analysis 26, no. 2 (2018): 140–54.

10 Galleries, Libraries, Archive and Museums.

11 For an Australian example, see J.P. Parkinson, ‘The Castle Hill lunatic asylum (1811–1826) and the origins of eclectic pragmatism in Australian psychiatry’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 15, no. 4 (1981): 319–22.

12 Trevor Turner, ‘Introduction’, in Lectures on the History of Psychiatry. The Squibb Series, ed. R.M. Murray and T.H. Turner (London: Gaskell, 1990), viii–xi.

13 G. Ash, C. Hilton, R. Freudenthal, T. Stephenson and G. Ikkos, ‘History of psychiatry in the curriculum? History is part of life and life is part of history: Why psychiatrists need to understand it better’, The British Journal of Psychiatry 217, no. 4 (2020): 535–36.

14 Murray and Turner, Lectures on the History of Psychiatry.

15 Allan Beveridge, ‘The history of psychiatry: personal reflections’, Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 44, no. 1 (2014): 77–84.

16 Allan Beveridge, ‘Lectures on the History of Psychiatry: The Squibb Series’, British Journal of Psychiatry 157, no. 4 (1990): 631.

17 Beveridge, ‘The history of psychiatry’, 77–84.

18 Henry R. Rollin, ‘The Anatomy of Madness. Essays in the History of Psychiatry. Vol III. The Asylum and its Psychiatry’, The British Journal of Psychiatry 155, no. 1 (1989): 144–45. For details of ongoing ‘punch-ups’, see, for example, John Crammer, ‘English Asylums and English doctors, where Scull is wrong’, History of Psychiatry 5, no. 17 (1994): 103–15; H. Mersky, ‘Somatic Treatments, Ignorance and the Historiography of Psychiatry’, History of Psychiatry 5, no. 19 (1994): 387–91; Andrew Scull, ‘Psychiatrists and Historical “Facts”. Part One: The Historiography of Somatic Treatments’, History of Psychiatry 6, no. 22 (1995): 225–41; Andrew Scull, ‘Psychiatrists and Historical “Facts”. Part Two: Re-writing the History of Asylumdom’, History of Psychiatry 6, no. 23 (1995): 387–94.

19 The second volume of The Anatomy of Madness included a chapter from Patricia Allderidge.

20 Bill Luckin, ‘Towards a Social History of Institutionalisation’, Social History 8, no. 1 (1983): 87–94.

21 Trevor, ‘Introduction’, viii–xi.

22 Sander L. Gilman. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to Aids (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Sander L. Gilman, Seeing the Insane (New York: Wiley, 1996).

23 Patricia A. Stout, Jorge Villegas and Nancy A. Jennings, ‘Images of Mental Illness in the Media: Identifying Gaps in the Research’, Schizophrenia Bulletin 30 no. 3 (2004): 543–61.

24 Catharine Coleborne, ‘Collecting Psychiatry’s Past. Collectors and Collections of Psychiatric Objects in Western Histories’, in Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display, ed. Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (London: Routledge, 2011); Rob Ellis, ‘“Without decontextualisation”: the Stanley Royd Museum and the progressive history of mental health care’, History of Psychiatry 26, no. 3 (2015): 332–47.

25 Coleborne, ‘Collecting Psychiatry’s Past’.

26 ‘Museum Display: The evolving history of Friern Hospital, 1849–1984 and beyond’, c.1985, H12/CH/A/31/1/25/2, London Metropolitan Archives. See also Richard Hunter and Ida MacAlpine, Psychiatry for the Poor: Colney Hatch Asylum—Friern Hospital 1851–1973 (London: Wm. Dawson, 1974). For a longer-term story of Colney Hatch see Robert Ellis, London and its Asylums: Politics and Madness (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

27 Hilda Keane, ‘Public History as a Social Form of Knowledge’, in The Oxford Handbook of Public History, ed. Paula Hamilton and James B. Gardner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

28 Corinne Manning, Bye-Bye Charlie: Stories from the Vanishing World of Kew Cottages (Sydney: USNW Press, 2008).

29 Mark Finnane, ‘Australian Asylums and Their Histories: Introduction’, Health and History 11, no. 1 (2009): 6–8.

30 Finnane, ‘Australian Asylums and Their Histories’, 6–8.

31 Joanna Besley and Carol Low, ‘Hurting and Healing. Reflections on representing experiences of mental illness in Museums’, in Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum, ed. Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (London: Routledge, 2010), 130–42.

32 Simon Wessely, ‘Inside Bedlam, England's first mental institution’, Times, 14 September 2016.

33 Jonathan Jones, ‘Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond review – missed opportunity to truly explore mental health’, Guardian, 19 September 2016. See also Catharine Coleborne, ‘An end to Bedlam? The enduring subject of madness in social and cultural history’, Social History 42, no. 3 (2017): 420–29.

34 John O’Donoghue, ‘Wellcome Collection: Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond, Disability Arts Online’, last modified 22 September 2016, https://disabilityarts.online/magazine/opinion/bedlam-asylum-beyond/.

35 The ever-expanding list of titles for the Mental Health in Historical Perspective series published by Palgrave is a good example of the growth in this field.

36 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Separation of Mental Patients and other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961).

37 See for example, Bronwyn Labrum, ‘“Always Distinguishable From Outsiders”: Materialising Cultures of Clothing from Psychiatric Institutions’, in Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display, ed. Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); Dolly MacKinnon, ‘Snatches of Music, Flickering Images, and the Smell of Leather: The Material Culture of Recreational Pastimes in Psychiatric Collections in Scotland and Australia’, in Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display, ed. Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); Fiona R. Parrott, ‘Material and Visual Culture of Patients in a Contemporary Psychiatric Secure Unit’, in Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display, ed. Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).

38 ‘Engagement and Impact Assessment’, Australian Research Council, last modified 16 June 2021, https://www.arc.gov.au/engagement-and-impact-assessment.

39 ‘Truly Civic: Strengthening the connection between universities and their places’, UPP Foundation, last modified 2019, https://upp-foundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Civic-University-Commission-Final-Report.pdf.

40 Keane, ‘Public History as a Social Form of Knowledge’.

41 Georgina Robinson, ‘Remembering Goodna’, Brisbane Times, 12 January 2008.

42 Fiona Tuck and Scott Dickinson, ‘The Economic Impact of Museums in England, For Arts Council England’, last modified 2 March 2015, https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Economic_Impact_of_Museums_in_England_report.pdf.

43 See ‘Impact of our National Cultural Institutions’, Australian Government, last modified no date, https://www.arts.gov.au/what-we-do/museums-libraries-and-galleries/impact-our-national-cultural-institutions.

44 See ‘Inquiry into Australia’s Cultural and Creative Industries and Institutions’, last modified October 2020’ https://www.humanities.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/201028-AAH-Policy-Creative-Cultural-Industries_final.pdf.

45 See ‘Explore our research’, Australia Council for the Arts, https://australiacouncil.gov.au/advocacy-and-research/#search-posts-block_60f493f86305b; ‘Welcome to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’, Australian Bureau of Statistics, https://www.abs.gov.au/, accessed 14 June 2021.

46 Tuck and Dickinson, ‘The Economic Impact of Museums’. See also Lois Silverman, ‘The therapeutic potential of museums as pathways to inclusion’, in Museums, Society and Equality, ed. Richard Sandel (London: Routledge, 2002), 69–83.

47 Lola Young, cited in Elizabeth Crooke, Museums and Community, ideas issues and challenges (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 86.

48 ‘Inspiring, leading and resourcing the UK’s Heritage’, National Lottery Heritage Fund, last modified no date, https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/Heritage%20Fund%20-%20Strategic%20Funding%20Framework%202019-2024.pdf.

49 Robinson, ‘Remembering Goodna’.

50 Ellis, ‘Without decontextualisation’.

51 ‘About Us’, Mental Health Museum, last modified 19 July 2021, https://www.southwestyorkshire.nhs.uk/mental-health-museum/about-us/why-change/.

52 Ibid.

53 Ellis, ‘Without decontextualisation’, 332–47.

54 Vicky Long, Destigmatising mental illness?: Professional politics and public education in Britain, 1870–1970 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); R. Ellis, ‘“A constant irritation to the townspeople”? Local, Regional and National Politics and London's County Asylums at Epsom’, Social History of Medicine 26, no. 4 (2013): 653–71.

55 Wulf. Rössler, ‘The stigma of mental disorders. A millennia‐long history of social exclusion and prejudices’, Science & Society 17, no. 9, (2016): 1250–53.

56 David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 120–21. See also, for example, David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country - Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

57 Ash, Hilton, Freudenthal, Stephenson and Ikkos, ‘History of psychiatry in the curriculum?’, 535–36.

58 Rob Ellis, ‘Heritage and Stigma. Co-producing and Communicating the Histories of Mental Health and Learning Disability’, Medical Humanities 43, no. 2 (2017): 92–98; Niklas Altermark, Citizenship, Inclusion and Intellectual Disability (London & New York: Routledge, 2018).

59 John Turner, Rhodri Hayward, Katherine Angel, Bill Fulford, John Hall, Chris Millard and Mathew Thomson, ‘The History of Mental Health Services in Modern England: Practitioner Memories and the Direction of Future Research’, Medical History 59, no. 4 (2015): 599–624, 604–05; James Raferty, ‘The decline of asylum or the poverty of the concept’, in Asylum in the Community, ed. Dylan Tomlinson and John Carrier (London: Routledge, 1996), 18–30, 26.

60 ‘Lack of beds leaves patients with serious mental illness without treatment during the pandemic’, Royal College of Psychiatrists, last modified 29 January 2021, https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/news-and-features/latest-news/detail/2021/01/29/lack-of-beds-leaves-patients-with-serious-mental-illness-without-treatment-during-the-pandemic.

61 Besley and Low, ‘Hurting and Healing’.

62 ‘Defining Impact’, ESRC, last modified 23 September 2021, https://esrc.ukri.org/research/impact-toolkit/whatis-impact/.

63 Ellis, Kendal and Taylor, ‘Voices in the History of Madness: An Introduction’.

64 Paula Hamilton, Paul Ashton and Tanya Evans, ‘Making Histories, Making Memories in Difficult Times’, in Making Histories, ed. Paul Ashton, Tanya Evans and Paula Hamilton (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020), 1–7.

65 Keane, ‘Public History as a Social Form of Knowledge’.

66 Besley and Low, ‘Hurting and Healing’.

67 Barbara Brookes, ‘Pictures of People, Pictures of Places. Photography and the Asylum’, in Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display, ed. Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (London: Routledge, 2011).

68 ‘Museum Display: The evolving history of Friern Hospital, 1849–1984 and beyond’, c.1985, H12/CH/A/31/1/25/2, London Metropolitan Archives. For a longer-term story of Colney Hatch see Ellis, London and its Asylums: Politics and Madness.

69 Barbara Taylor, The Last Asylum. A Memoir of Madness in Our Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

70 Verusca Calabria, Di Bailey and Graham Bowpitt, ‘More than bricks and mortar: meaningful care practices in the old state mental hospitals’, in Voices in the History of Madness: Personal and Professional Perspectives on Mental Health and Illness, ed. Rob Ellis, Sarah Kendal and Steven J. Taylor (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

71 Anna Clark, ‘Private Lives, Public History: Navigating Historical Consciousness in Australia’, History Compass 14, no. 1 (2016): 1–8.

72 Alison Faulkner, ‘Knowing Our Own Minds: Transforming the Knowledge Base of Madness and Distress’, in Voices in the History of Madness: Personal and Professional Perspectives on Mental Health and Illness, ed. Rob Ellis, Sarah Kendal and Steven J. Taylor (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); Megan Alikhanizadeh, Corey Hartley, Sarah Kendal, Liz Neill and Gemma Trainor, ‘Often, When I Am Using My Voice… It Does Not Go Well: Perspectives on the Service User Experience’, in Voices in the History of Madness: Personal and Professional Perspectives on Mental Health and Illness, ed. Rob Ellis, Sarah Kendal and Steven J. Taylor (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

73 Cheryl McGeachan, ‘Tracking traces of the art extraordinary collection’, in Voices in the History of Madness: Personal and Professional Perspectives on Mental Health and Illness, ed. Rob Ellis, Sarah Kendal and Steven J. Taylor (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

74 M. Kelemen, E. Surman and L. Dikomitis, ‘Cultural animation in health research: An innovative methodology for patient and public involvement and engagement’, Health expectations: an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy 21, no. 4 (2018): 805–13.

75 Bill Roberts and Michael Myock, ‘The Experience of Introducing Work‐Based Learning on an Arts Degree Course’, Journal of Further and Higher Education 15, no. 3 (1991): 76–85, 76–77. See also Bill Roberts and Michael Myock, ‘Work‐Based Learning on an Arts Degree Course’, Journal of Further and Higher Education 19, no. 1 (1995): 62–72.

76 Amanda Ruggeri, ‘Why “worthless” humanities degrees may set you up for life’, BBC, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190401-why-worthless-humanities-degrees-may-set-you-up-for-life (last accessed 23 June 2021).

77 Besley and Low, ‘Hurting and Healing’, 132–33.

78 G. O’Reilly, ‘Sustainable Development versus Human-made Atrocities – Never Again’, in Places of Memory and Legacies in an Age of Insecurities and Globalization, ed. G. O’Reilly (Cham: Springer, 2020), 129.

79 Keane, ‘Public History as a Social Form of Knowledge’.

80 Besley and Low, ‘Hurting and Healing’, 137–40.

81 Nurin Veis, ‘The Ethics of Exhibiting Psychiatric Materials’, in Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display, ed. Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (London: Routledge, 2011).