Dr Alison Watts

In this article we evaluate micro-history as a method for investigating the meaning of stigma, shame and family secrets through generations. We present micro-histories of two Australian soldiers who developed mental illness years after serving in World War 1 and were committed to a psychiatric hospital where they died. Data were drawn from publicly available records and interviews with family members. The contrasting stories held by the families of each man illustrate the transmission of stigma and secrets through families. We explore possible reasons for the differences between the families related to the wider literature on stigma and mental health and show why the family stories people present should be considered social constructions rather than facts. We also address ethical issues that arose during the research, and which have relevance for researchers investigating sensitive or potentially stigmatising topics.

Wilbert Gesler (1992) used the term “therapeutic landscape” in 1992 to explore why certain places or

situations were perceived to be therapeutic. He drew on extensive literature from the social sciences

and philosophy and devised a three-factor conceptual framework that considered physical, social and

symbolic domains. Gesler emphasised that the concept was an analytic framework rather than an ideal

type, and that it could be applied in practice to investigate places where healing took place.

Subsequently, it has been widely used in studies of asylums and mental health care.

In the fi fi rst part of my presentation, I will critically analyse the concept and provide examples of its use,

drawn from my study of the former Beechworth asylum. I will then consider aspects of contemporary

mental health care, asking whether deinstitutionalisation led to the loss of the therapeutic landscape

and consequent shortcomings in care. I take a broad view of “therapeutic”, extending from patients to

include their families, asylum staff and the wider community.

Prosopography, otherwise known as collective biography, is a method that has been widely used by historians but is less well known as a sociological research technique. In this article, we review definitions and uses of prosopography, its advantages and limitations. We describe steps in the method with reference to a study of the Beechworth Asylum cricket team in rural Victoria, Australia, and show the extent of members’ involvement with activities in the town. Prosopography is shown to be a useful tool for sociological research, while findings of the study add to the limited literature about staff in Australian asylums.

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.

In this article, we explore employment practices at Mayday Hills Mental Hospital, Beechworth, Victoria in the thirty years or so before its closure in 1995, principally through the eyes of staff. Beechworth was an isolated country town and the hospital was a major employer. While psychiatric hospitals struggled to attract staff, two factors operating at Mayday Hills served to mitigate this shortage. Local people were familiar with its environment, with generations of families working there, and government jobs offered security. However, the complex pattern of relationships built up over generations between staff and in the town meant that conformity to unwritten norms was rigidly enforced through pranks, hazing and trade union activity.

This article investigates new and experimental medical treatments used to cure ‘maternal insanity’ in women committed to Victorian psychiatric institutions between 1920 and 1936. Close examination of the women’s clinical files reveals the use of numerous treatments, vaccines, and tests that produced a wide range of patient outcomes. Patients received the ‘medically safe’ typhoid vaccine and Wassermann test, while the more controversial insulin coma therapy, ultraviolet ‘rays’, sterilisation, and abortion posed serious health risks. Gender influenced doctors’ therapeutic rationale in most cases, while in other instances treatments strengthened the patient–doctor relationship by offering patients hope for recovery. The treatments prescribed to insane mothers remind us of the stark realities of experimental physical treatments in Australia’s past.

Mayday Hills, the former mental hospital in Beechworth, has an iconic presence in the Border region. A cross-University, cross-disciplinary research team has been collecting data for several years, including interviews, photographs and artefacts, and creating artworks and publications in response to the data collection. In 2016 the researchers had an exhibition at the Albury LibraryMuseum entitled UpTop: A Sense of Place for Mayday Hills Hospital.

The current exhibition extends the earlier one by presenting items from different collections, some of which have not been seen in public before. It represents the outcomes of the various aspects of the researchers’ work: social history, archival research and the arts. The research continues because there are many stories to tell and we hope to collect quite a few from people visiting the exhibition. We can never know enough about our past, even if it is an uncomfortable past.

This thesis examines puerperal insanity and child-birth related illnesses in early twentieth-century Australia. It investigates the psychiatric and social discourses that linked motherhood and birthing with mental illness. The research draws on clinical case notes of thirty-one patients, including a member of the researcher’s family, Ada (pseudonym). These women were committed to Royal Melbourne Reception House, Victoria, between the years 1920 and 1936.

The work examines the ways that nineteenth-century medical interest in women’s diseases remained highly influential on twentieth-century ideas of gender, mothers and mental illness. In particular, a diagnosis of puerperal insanity could be prompted by any one of several symptoms; violent and harmful behaviour, hallucinations or mania. It usually occurred within the days or weeks following childbirth, and for mothers the condition was known to cause death, suicide, and at its worst, infanticide, at a time usually associated with joy within the family.

Scholars generally agree that the diagnosis of ‘puerperal insanity’ belonged to the nineteenth century, when child-birth was connected to a host of women’s diseases perceived as affecting their brain. However, the thirty-one women’s patient clinical notes used in this study illustrate that puerperal insanity remained a valid cause to commit mothers in Australia, even though it was no longer in use in Britain and the United States by the turn of the century, according to historical studies cited in this thesis. This thesis is significant in its contribution of new knowledge to the history of puerperal insanity and maternal insanity in Australia, as no other work has been undertaken on these topics in the early twentieth century context. It therefore seeks to address this gap.

This thesis applies feminist poststructuralist approaches to the ways both psychiatric and lay language constructed mothers as ‘unfit.’ It is set in the social context of the federated nation, where women continued to be caught in nineteenth-century gendered power relations in both the patriarchal nature of families, psychiatry and medicine. It provides distinctive aspects of puerperal insanity unique to the context of twentieth-century Australian women, as well as to medical and psychiatric contexts and conditions. This thesis argues that given the ‘othering’ of mothers in psychiatric and social discourses within the patriarchal society, a diagnosis of puerperal insanity and birth-related illness was often arbitrary, and that it instead should be understood as directly linked to cultural beliefs about the home, family and the mother role.