Memory, Anniversaries and Mental Health in International Historical Perspective

Rebecca Wynter is a historian at the Universities of Amsterdam and Birmingham. She has published widely on the histories of psychiatry, mental health, neurology, first response, and so-called ‘conversion therapy’. She is active in public history, working with museums, institutions and people to reveal the past.Jennifer Wallis is a Medical Humanities Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine at Imperial College London, UK. She has published widely on the nineteenth-century asylum and the history of medicine in the Victorian period.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 worked in partnership to co-produce projects that have emphasized their contemporary relevance.

“This thought-provoking essay collection will generate enthusiasm for new ways of considering the past and reframing the present through troubling our interpretation of what has been written before. It is certainly worth reading to generate reflections on what the legacy of our own work may be.” (Jennifer Parker, The British Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 225 (3), September, 2024)

• 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.