“Hanging Around in Their Brokenness”: On Mental Ill-Health Geography, Asylums and Camps, Artworks and Salvage

Abstract

The subdisciplinary field of mental health geography has arguably departed from its initial emphasis on mental ill health, and a case is made for continuing to take seriously the lifeworlds of people with severe and enduring mental health conditions, particularly if resident in psychiatric inpatient facilities. Attempting to (re)humanize inquiries in this field, emphasis is lent to the task of repeopling mental health geographies and, more broadly, to conjoining criticality in the vein of Agamben with a gentle humanism open to both “bareness” and “life.” Agamben’s claims about “bare life” and “the camp” are interfaced with inquiries into “the asylum,” and a triangular encounter between Holocaust authors Levi, Bettelheim, and Barton is staged—set in the horizon of Agamben’s ([1999] 2002) Remnants of Auschwitz—to craft a new sensibility for researching mental ill-health geographies. The authors then explore an act of “salvage” whereby the artworks of long-forgotten asylum dwellers are recovered, not to disclose hidden truths of “madness,” but rather to acknowledge those who drew, painted, wove, or sculpted as part of living with mental ill health. The overall ambition is to attune to the situation of—and to possibilities for “witnessing” in the relative absence of words—those who are barely there at the margins of the camp-asylum.