Main description:

This book is the first to explore memory, misremembering, forgetting, and anniversaries in the history of psychiatry and mental health. It challenges simplistic representations of the callous nature of mental health care in the past, while at the same time eschewing a celebratory and uncritical marking of anniversaries and individuals. Asking critical questions of the early Whiggish histories of mental health care, the book problematises the idea of a shared professional and institutional history, and the abiding faith placed in the reform of medicine, administration, and even patients. It contends that much post-1800 legislation drafted to ensure reform, acted to preserve beliefs about the 'bad old days' and a 'brighter future' in the state memories of imperial powers, which in turn exported these notions around the world. Conversely, the collection demonstrates the variety of remembering and forgetting, building on recent interest in the ideological and cultural linkages between past and present in international psychiatric practice. In this way, it seeks to trace the pathways of memory, exploring the direction of travel, and the perpetuation, remodeling, and uprooting of recollection.

Chapter 3 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Contents:

1. Marking Time: Memory, Mental Health and Making Minds; Rebecca Wynter, Rob Ellis, and Jennifer Wallis.
Part I: Governance.
2. Carrying on with 'Common-Sense': Rebuffing reform in Bombay's Lunatic Asylums, 1894-1933; Sarah Pinto.3. The new socialist citizen and 'forgetting' authoritarianism: Psychiatry, psychoanalysis and revolution in socialist Yugoslavia; Ana Antic.
Part II: Practitioners.
4. Appropriating Wilhelm Griesinger's Asylum Reform Legacy (1868-2018): Some Reflections on Historiographic Narratives of Failure; Eric J. Engstrom.5. Remodelling the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna: Memories, Museums, and Curatorial Considerations; Daniela Finzi and Monika Pessler.
Part III: Casebooks.
6. Madness, Memory and Delusion in Later Nineteenth-Century Colonial Barbados; Leonard Smith.7. Gone But Not Forgotten: Acts of Remembrance in the Late-nineteenth and Early-twentieth Century Asylum; Katherine Rawling.8. The Institute for Imbecile Children: remembering the lives and experiences of the patients; Rory du Plessis.
Part III: Oral Histories.
9. Surprise and Nostalgia: Staff Narrate the Closure of an American Psychiatric Hospital, Elizabeth Nelson, Emily Beckman; and Modupe Labode.10. An Exploration of the Function of Nostalgia in Oral Histories of Institutional Care; Verusca Calabria.
Part IV: Personal Recollections.
11. Talking Personality: Reflections on Historical Words, Diagnoses, and My Own Experience; Barbara Norden.12. 'If your memory serves you well': Reflections on becoming a psychiatrist; Allan Beveridge.