Abstract
Abstract In this paper, we consider changes to memorial practices for mental health service users during the asylum period of the mid-nineteenth up to the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. The closing of large asylums in the UK has been largely welcomed by professionals and service-users alike, but their closure has led to a decrease in continuous and consistent care for those with enduring mental health challenges. Temporary and time-limited mental health services, largely dedicated to crisis management and risk reduction have failed to enable memory practices outside the therapy room. This is an unusual case of privatised memories being favoured over collective memorial activity. We argue that the collectivisation of service user memories, especially in institutions containing large numbers of long-stay patients, would benefit both staff and patients. The benefit would be in the development of awareness of how service users make sense of their past in relation to their present stay in hospital, how they might connect with others in similar positions and how they may connect with the world and others upon future release. This seems to us central to a project of recovery and yet is rarely practised in any mental health institution in the UK, despite being central to other forms of care provision, such as elderly and children's care services. We offer some suggestions on how collective models of memory in mental health might assist in this project of recovery and create greater visibility between past, present and future imaginings.
Highlights
In approximately 1895, Agnes Richter, an inmate from the Hubertusberg Psychiatric Institution near Dresden, Germany, meticulously inscribed into her asylum jacket what is thought to be an autobiographical narrative and set of difficult memories
Some of the most well-known include those by John Perceval and Daniel Schreber (2000), both written in the nineteenth century, and more recently those of Susanna Kaysen (2000), Carol North (2013) and Barbara Taylor (2015)
We argue that the way mental health institutions ‘think’ about memory, and the media through which remembering is enacted are partly constitutive of how mental health itself is conceptualised and treated
Summary
In approximately 1895, Agnes Richter, an inmate from the Hubertusberg Psychiatric Institution near Dresden, Germany, meticulously inscribed into her asylum jacket what is thought to be an autobiographical narrative and set of difficult memories. As a media for remembering, the jacket can tell us something about how emergent memory practices were organised within a very particular institutional setting, how they intersected with the ongoing lived experiences of persons detained within them, and what kinds of prospects these may or may not have given rise to.
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