Farming, Psychiatry and Rural Society

This book is about the history of farming, psychiatry and rural society, which were closely intertwined during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The complex inter-relationships between them are central to understanding psychiatric institutions, the countryside, and the people who lived and worked in these spaces. The book focuses on asylum and hospital farms and positions them within the wider context of ideas about mental illness and mental difference.This book examines the varied interconnections between rurality and mental illness, including the fragility and resilience of rural communities; the exchange of ideas and the institutional rhetoric about farm work for patients; the intersections between institutions and rural society, and importantly the experiences and ‘voices’ of patients, particularly those working on institutional farms, and those experiencing mental illness outside the institution. The book establishes the countryside and institutional farms as pivotal places for investigating and understanding health and disability. Despite the important role of farming and the countryside in ideas about, and experiences of, psychiatry and mental illness or difference, this is the first in-depth historical study to position these spaces and people centre stage.Farming, Psychiatry and Rural Society will appeal to those interested in or studying histories of the countryside or histories of mental health, psychiatry and patient voices. This will include undergraduate and postgraduate students, historical researchers and those in adjacent fields.