Preserving the Institutional Past and Histories of Psychiatry: Writing about Tokanui Hospital, New Zealand, 1950s-1990s

Abstract

role of institutional histories in evaluating psychiatry's past. Located near the small town of Te Awamutu in the North Island, Tokanui opened in 1912 and housed people with intellectual disability, those with acute psychiatric disability and those with neurological impairment.1 By the 1950s, Tokanui was overcrowded, housing more than 1000 patients. For many members of its community, the institution was a happy place. Tokanui's fiftieth Jubilee commemoration took place in 1962, and, at that point, a brief history was prepared to mark the half century of a place that had developed and changed alongside psychiatric practices in New Zealand. Tokanui also celebrated with a Jubilee ball, the proceeds of which helped to fund a swimming pool, opened later in 1968. Such practices and performances at moments of historic significance for institutions like Tokanui show that 'history' itself was valued by the institutional community. This article suggests that institutional histories have become even more important for places like Tokanui since the era of deinstitutionalisation or institutional closures. In New Zealand, this era was officially underway by the 1980s, but was arguably a process that began much earlier, as historians have suggested. In order to explore the value of an institutional history of Tokanui, the article provides some background to Tokanui's history and examines the experiences of the institution from the 1950s, and in the following decades until its proposed closure in the 1990s. It uses archival materials, official government records and histories of other New Zealand institutions. It also refers to some oral histories of members of Tokanui's community that were recorded in the 1990s to explore the problem of institutional memory and histories of psychiatry following the era of deinstitutionalisation. It argues that many histories of twentieth-century psychiatric institutions, produced during and after the era of deinstitutionalisation,