[SydPhil] HPS Research Seminar, Monday 18, March 2024 at 5:30pm

[HPS Admin]

School of History and Philosophy of Science
RESEARCH SEMINAR
[The University of Sydney]
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Aftercare as a rewriting of mental health history: the case of
Australia to 1920
Professor Catharine Coleborne (University of Newcastle)

Dates: Monday, 18/3/2024
Time: 5:30pm
Venue: New Law Building (F10), Level 3, Room 344
How to register: Free, no registration required

Abstract: In my work Madness in the Family, I pioneered a focus on 214 cases of family interactions with institutions using a series of linked records (case material, correspondence, visitors’ books, records of leave of absence and trial home visits) that showed a deeper engagement between family, medical authorities, and institutional practices. This work provides me with a model for a new project about mental health aftercare between 1900 and 1960. Aftercare existed before psychotropic medications, community solutions and mental health support started to become the mainstay of post-institutional care from the 1960s when the processes of deinstitutionalisation began.

While my past work opened the question of the instability of the archive in the creation of knowledge about mental illness, it also pointed to the way that institutions operated in a dialogue with families and friends about mental breakdown. That dialogue contained clues about the way institutions reached into communities, as well as about experiments in care at an early stage of Australia’s evolving approach to mental health treatment. This paper for discussion will share my continued interest in the possibilities suggested by that dialogue of the latter decades of the nineteenth century by focusing on new work-in-progress based on some sources from the available records of After Care NSW and Gladesville Hospital to 1920. Given that aftercare was and is a form of assistance for people when they leave mental hospitals, such as the provision of practical help by charitable organisations to reintegrate them into work, families, and communities, I am curious about what was happening both outside and also between institutions during this period.

Studying extra-institutional care means examining the interactions, flows, transfers, and engagements between people with mental illness and those who sought to assist them. This ‘mobility of practices’ suggested by forms of aftercare - as geographer Tim Cresswell might say -  shatters previously held concepts of ‘closed institutions’, at the same time suggesting possibilities for models of mental health care in our present.


Bio: Professor Catharine Coleborne holds a new ARC Discovery Project grant with Dr Effie Karageorgos at the University of Newcastle focused on mental health aftercare from 1900 to 1960. Her next forthcoming book is Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia: Regulating Mobility, 1840 to 1910 (Bloomsbury 2024). Cathy has been based at the University of Newcastle since late 2015.

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