Catharine Coleborne

“His Brain was Wrong, His Mind Astray”: Families and the Language of Insanity in New South Wales, Queensland, and New Zealand, 1880s-1910

Family and friends made descriptions of the behavior of individuals at the time of their committal to institutions for the insane in Australasian colonies, including Gladesville Hospital for the Insane, Sydney, New South Wales; Goodna Hospital for the Insane, near Brisbane in Queensland; and the Auckland Mental Hospital in New Zealand’s North Island, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These lay descriptions of insanity, gleaned from those close to patients by doctors during initial interviews at the stage of asylum committal, eventually became marginal notes in clinical patient cases. This article seeks to understand this interplay between lay descriptions by family and friends and the asylum’s use of these descriptions in its profiling and diagnosis of patients. It argues that patient case notes should be reexamined as rich sources of information about families, households, and, most importantly, the language used by ordinary people to describe mental states.

Psychiatry and its institutions in Australia and New Zealand: An overview

In 1988, historianNancy Tomesmapped out a history of the Anglo-American asylum. She began by commenting that debate in the present era around the mental hospital, including decades of institutional closures, had led to a series of historical expositions of the nineteenth-century asylum (Tomes, 1988: p. 3). Some years later, historians are experiencing a renewed engagement with these questions, but from some different parts of the world, and from new perspectives. This article seeks to place the histories of psychiatry in Australia and New Zealand within the broad parameters of a postcolonial approach to mental health care provision. By ‘postcolonial’ we mean to interrogate the relationship between the beginnings of the psychiatric institution in former English settler colonies which made transitions to nationhood in the early part of the twentieth century, and the late twentieth-century system ofmental health care. We also comment upon contemporary postcolonial health care practices around mental health. We focus on sketching the chronological development of psychiatry in both places, but also introduce the themes of settler colonialism and psychiatry; indigenous peoples and institutions; mental hygiene and immigration; twentieth-century psychiatry; and institutional closures. This critical overview touches on new and emerging scholarship in the field and draws upon a range of existing histories of psychiatry and its institutions. Historians agree that psychiatric treatment as it developed in Australia and New Zealand was largely based on British practices (Kirkby, 1999: p. 198; Brunton, 1996: p. 4) and was part of a wider set of developments in the western or Anglo-American world (Garton, 1988). Yet unlike Britain and America, there was never a strong presence of private institutions in either nation. The colonies were slow to adopt the major reforms of the old world, although the discourse of ‘moral therapy’ crept into asylum practices (Garton, 1988: p. 17). Writing about the shared histories of psychiatry in Australia and New Zealand, historians have found both parallels and sharp distinctions (Cunningham-Dax, 1975; Coleborne, 2001: p. 110). The histories of psychiatry in each country have captured the attention of successive generations of historians with work ranging from institutional and professional histories to social histories of insanity (Brothers, 1964; Brookes & Thomson, 2001; Coleborne & MacKinnon, 2003; Garton, 1988; Lewis, 1988). The postcolonial history of health is still being defined. Warwick Anderson has recently provided a cogent description of the postcolonial history of medicine (Anderson, 2004). His insistence on moving beyond ‘national’ frameworks is addressed here by our pairing of two places which began life as multiple colonies. Extrapolating from Anderson, a postcolonial history most certainly involves an awareness of both the historical context of imperialism and colonisation, the tensions around any claim of ‘decolonisation’ in the case of white settler states, and the experiences of indigenous peoples in the present, including their negotiations with dominant health care provisions and their own strategies for health and well-being. In particular, it might address historical explanations for the poor state of indigenous health, ‘widely attributed to colonisation and its manifestations’ (Kowal & Paridies, 2005: p. 1347). In the case of former settler colonies, Australia and New Zealand, some attention to the historical experiences of newcomers or immigrants is also important. As Anderson writes, historians have paid attention to the way that cultural concepts of hygiene have been instrumental in the ‘disciplining, and even

Remembering Psychiatry’s Past The Psychiatric Collection and its Display at Porirua Hospital Museum, New Zealand

This article explores the historical meanings of a collection of psychiatric objects on display at the Porirua Hospital Museum, at Porirua, near Wellington, in New Zealand. Founded in 1987 to celebrate the original asylum’s centenary, the museum commemorates the history of the institution. Its curators are former psychiatric nursing staff. Visitors to the museum include educators, researchers and members of the psychiatric community. This article asks why some people have preserved the ‘relics’ of past psychiatry. Such collections and museum exhibitions raise fascinating questions about the 20th-century experience of psychiatric institutions, and the role of the museum collection in people’s lives. In talking about why and how former staff have struggled to preserve their private memories through collections of physical objects, and by interpreting history inside the space of the museum, the article suggests that historians can make a new contribution to the understandings of psychiatric institutions in histories of 20th-century psychiatry.

Ten‐pound poms revisited: Battlers’ tales and British migration to Australia, 1947‐1971

Migrants. ..will have a wide range of experiences to relate — many happy but some such as my own, not so happy. There would be many tales of hardship and incredible toil and travail to be told — and which need and HAVE to be told before these people die and their stories are lost forever.. .those stories that are outside the stream of success stories and satisfaction with having to come to live here — but I feel this is a story that has to be and MUST be told to show that life is not always a bed of roses. (Irene Y Kaukas to BBC, 28 October 1996)

Insanity and ethnicity in New Zealand: Māori encounters with the Auckland Mental Hospital, 1860-1900.

This article examines Māori patients at the Auckland Mental Hospital between 1860 and 1900. We argue that the patient case notes reveal ‘European’ categories in which Māori were situated, and demonstrate the extent to which the authorities at the hospital grappled with their appearance, their language and their culture, all of which were elements of their ethnicity. We argue that the use of institutional case records is highly suggestive of some of the historical meanings of insanity for Māori, including the lack of detailed or sustained collection of information about patients’ tribal affiliations, the interest shown in their rights to land in maintenance payment inquiries, the experiences of cultural alienation or mate Māori, and the sad outcomes for Māori.

White men and weak masculinity: men in the public asylums in Victoria, Australia, and New Zealand, 1860s–1900s:

This article reveals a set of formulations of masculine identity through the fragments of extant casebook evidence from nineteenth-century psychiatric institutions in Victoria, Australia, and Auckland, New Zealand. It shows that some patterns in the identification of masculinity and insanity emerge, also highlighting the relevance of individual stories and ‘cases’ to fully understand how masculine identities were fashioned through medical institutional language.

Pursuing Families for Maintenance Payments to Hospitals for the Insane in Australia and New Zealand, 1860s–1914

Abstract Between the 1860s and 1914, the collection of maintenance payments for the public care of the insane was improved, yet attempts to encourage full payments from families and friends of the insane consistently failed. These efforts to recover maintenance reveal the vulnerabilities of the colonial family in relation to mental illness. This article argues that cooperation and resistance to maintenance payments by families of the institutionalised coexisted during the period. Archival evidence of the struggles that took place over the care of the insane demonstrates contestation during the period about the relationship between state and private responsibility.

Robert Winston's Superhuman: Spectacle, Surveillance and Patient Narrative

Health psychologists are being challenged by researchers to consider interdisciplinary approaches to health research, particularly around media representations. This article argues that the praxis and research of health psychology might benefit from strategic and interdisciplinary readings of media texts. It argues that insights from current documentary theory are important because they show us how documentary texts are structured and how medical documentary deploys techniques from medicine itself in order to effect certain persuasive discursive shifts in our wider culture. The article takes the BBC documentary series Superhumanas its example and explores this text as it involves media spectacle, medical surveillance of the body and of patients and the positioning of patient narratives of personal experiences with medical intervention.

Lives in the Asylum Record, 1864 to 1910: Utilising Large Data Collection for Histories of Psychiatry and Mental Health

This article examines the research implications and uses of data for a large project investigating institutional confinement in Australia and New Zealand. The cases of patients admitted between 1864 and 1910 at four separate institutions, three public and one private, provided more than 4000 patient records to a collaborative team of researchers. The utility and longevity of this data and the ways to continue to understand its significance and contents form the basis of this article’s interrogation of data collection and methodological issues surrounding the history of psychiatry and mental health. It examines the themes of ethics and access, record linkage, categories of data analysis, comparison and record keeping across colonial and imperial institutions, and constraints and opportunities in the data itself. The aim of this article is to continue an ongoing conversation among historians of mental health about the role and value of data collection for mental health and to signal the relevance of international multi-sited collaborative research in this field.

Colonial Families and Cultures of Health: Glimpses of Illness and Domestic Medicine in Private Records in New Zealand and Australia, 1850–1910

This article draws on both published and unpublished private family writing to examine how European settler colonial families in southeastern Australia and New Zealand negotiated worlds of sickness and health between 1850 and 1910. It argues that personal writing is a neglected yet rich repository for shedding light on colonial cultures of health across families and households in colonial Australia and New Zealand. In examining challenges to well-being and gendered lay health care practices inside domestic spaces, we glimpse more than worlds of health and treatment. Through their management of health and illness in private domestic spaces, the sense of well-being colonial families created for their members tells us something both about their emotional lives and cultures of colonialism.