A town without pity? Three stories of public exposure, print media, and family histories of madness in Western Australia

Abstract

It is sometimes easier to understand the chimeric experience of mental disorder by accessing individual episodes and incidents. This paper will review the lives of three strong-willed, charismatic individuals who all had influential and very public brushes with mental disorder in the small outpost city of Perth, Western Australia, between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. This opens up questions of retrospective diagnosis, the challenges of being mad in a small town, how print media has preserved these precarious individual narratives, and how individual histories of mental disorders can help to cast light on other aspects of mainstream Australian histories.