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Online firstCC BY V4.0, Open Access
Online firstCC BY V4.0, Open
Journal article
Maternal Insanity in the Family: Memories, Family Secrets, and the Mental Health Archive
Genealogy (Basel), Vol.7(1), pp.1-20
03/01/2023
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Abstract
This work investigates my family’s long-held secrets that concealed the whereabouts of my grandmother. After years of estrangement, my father discovered Ada living in a mental hospital. Memories are rarely straightforward and could only take us so far in understanding why Ada remained missing from our family for so long. My search for answers involved genealogical research and led me to access Ada’s mental patient files. This rich data source provided some troubling glimpses into Ada’s auditory hallucinations and grandiose delusions and her encounters with several mental institutions in Victoria, Australia, during the twentieth century. Critical family history approaches allow me to gain insights into the gendered power relations within her marriage and the power imbalance within families. The theme of migration is addressed through the lens of mobility when Ada relocated following her marriage and her movement between home on trial leave and several sites of care after her committal. Scholars have shown that the themes of migration and mobility are important and hold personal significance in exploring the connection between mental health and institutionalisation for our family. Here, I demonstrate how mental illness in families is stigmatised and concealed through institutionalisation and its legacy for younger generations.
Details
- Title
- Maternal Insanity in the Family: Memories, Family Secrets, and the Mental Health Archive
- Creators
- Alison Watts - Southern Cross University
- Publication Details
- Genealogy (Basel), Vol.7(1), pp.1-20
- Identifiers
- 991013076613802368
- Copyright
- © 2023 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Education; Faculty of Health
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article