CFP: Voices of Madness, Voices of Mental Ill-Health (15-16 September 2016)

from Steven Taylor:

Voices of Madness, Voices of Mental ill-health
Centre for Health Histories, University of Huddersfield
15th- 16th Sept 2016

In the thirty years since Roy Porter called on historians to lower their gaze so that they might better understand patient-doctor roles in the past, historians have sought to place the voices of previously, silent, marginalised and disenfranchised individuals at the heart of their analyses.

Contemporaneously, the development of service user groups and patient consultations have become an important feature of the debates and planning related to current approaches to prevention, care and treatment. The aim of this conference is to further explore and reveal how the voices of those living with and treating mental illness have been recorded and expressed.  We hope to consider recent developments in these areas with a view to facilitating an interdisciplinary discourse around historical perspectives of mental health and illness.

The organisers invite proposals for 20 minutes on the themes of voices of madness and mental ill health under headings including but not limited to:

Oral history and testimony

Mental ill-health and community care

Mental ill-health and institutional histories

The role of informal carers

The growth of the mental health professions

Mental ill health and the voice(s) of adolescentsand children

Museums and the ‘heritage’ of mental ill health

The literature (fiction and non-fiction) of mental ill health

Language of madness (if not covered by ‘heritage’)

Dissenting voices

Appropriation of voices

Absent voices

Voices and art

Voices and stigma

The voices of mental ill-health on TV and radio

Individual, activist and social media

For more information contact Dr Rob Ellis (r.ellis@hud.ac.uk), Dr Sarah Kendal (s.kendal@hud.ac.uk) or Dr Steven Taylor (s.taylor@hud.ac.uk). To submit a paper proposal (250 words maximum) or express an interest, please contact Steve Taylor by 14 March 2015.

We hope to offer some bursaries for postgraduate and early career researchers.

April 30: Juhan Liiv (1864-1913)

[visual description: portrait of poet Juhan Liiv as a young man, he appears to be fair-haired with light eyes; his expression is serious]

When I was only a little boy
A ringing was ringing in my mind.

And when I grew older
The ringing went louder.

Now I am almost buried in it,
My bosom is ruined under it,

My spirit and life are ringing sounds - Too cramped for them are earthly bounds!

--"Ringing" by Juhan Liiv (1910), as translated here

Estonian poet Juhan Liiv was born in this date in 1864, in the village of Alatskivi. He struggled with mental illness as a young man, and had trouble holding a job. His first story, "The Shadow," was published when he was thirty, and remains a classic of Estonian literature. But by the time it was published, he was staying at a clinic in Tartu, and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. A literary editor found his work and a volume of almost 500 poems by Liiv was published in 1909. Some of this poetry reflects Liiv's feelings of doom and fear, and his experiences as a poor and misunderstood man; other pages contain romantic or patriotic verses that found an appreciative audience.

Liiv died from pneumonia in winter 1913, after being thrown off a train (he didn't have a ticket, and unfortunately he didn't take his coat when he was ejected in a remote area). Today, Liiv is considered one of the finest poets in Estonian literature. His grave in his home village has a handsome marker, and the farm where he was raised is now a museum. Some of his writings have been set to music. Alatskivi also offers an annual Juhan Liiv Prize for Poetry.

Elyn Saks wins a 2009 MacArthur "genius" grant

USC law professor Elyn Saks, author of the memoir The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (which I posted about last year, here), has won one of this year's prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowships--the so-called "genius" grants--that "celebrate and support exceptional men and women of all ages and in all fields who dream, explore, take risks, invent, and build in new and unexpected ways in the interest of shaping a better future for us all."

Ugh.

[Visual description: cover of the Wii game, Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party; cartoon bunny-like creatures with wide-open mouths, unmatched eyes, and a TV screen]

Finding items like this on the front page of Amazon makes me less enthusiastic about holiday shopping this season.

From the product description at Amazon.com:

The Rabbids have taken over almost every channel you can imagine, from music to movies - even TV ads. Help the Rabbids destroy all our daily viewing and drive Rayman crazy. In Story Mode, play through a week of television, with each day bringing new wacky challenges of skill and insane movements in a compilation of mini-games. With up to eight players in turn-based mode and four players simultaneously, get ready for you and all your friends to go insane.

Really, they need to use the word "insane" twice in four sentences? Crazy, wacky, raving, and rabid too... which all apparently mean screaming with wide open mouths and unfocused eyes, causing havoc, chaos, destruction? "Get ready for you and all your friends to go insane." Lovely.

October 27: Sigrid Hjertén (1885-1948)

[Image description: A self-portrait by Sigrid Hjertén, showing herself painting, seated, in a plumed hat, with a pale-green top, bowtie, black belt, and red trousers; a child --presumably her son Ivan-- and his toy are nearby in the background.]

Born on this date in 1885, in Sundsvall, Swedish painter Sigrid Hjertén. Today she's recognized as a major figure in Scandinavian expressionism. She studied with Matisse; she married a fellow artist, Isaac Grünewald; she designed tapestries and ceramics. She had a solo exhibition at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in 1936, which was well-received.

By 1938, she was in her fifties, divorced, and experiencing mental illness. She had been hospitalized with symptoms of schizophrenia (as it was assessed in her time) as early as 1932; she would spend her last ten years in a Stockholm hospital, until she died from excessive bleeding during a botched surgical lobotomy in 1948.

July 13: John Clare (1793-1864)

[Image description: Engraved portrait of the poet John Clare, shown with tousled hair, wearing a suit with a heavy coat, vest, and a shirt loosely tied up with a print kerchief]

English poet John Clare was born on this date in 1793, in Helpston, near Peterborough. He was the son of a laborer, and himself a laborer, a gardener, who wrote poetry when he could, to be published by an acquaintance. His earnings were never enough to adequately support his wife and seven children (and his alcohol consumption); he experienced depression and later erratic behavior. In 1837 he was placed in a private asylum. After four years, he tried to live at home again, but his wife soon committed him again, this time to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he eventually died in 1864. It was at Northampton that he wrote his best known poem, "I Am," reflecting his sense of being abandoned by friends and loved ones, his vivid torments, and his longing for rest, "untroubling and untroubled."

I AM
John Clare

I am; yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

Eye-yi-yi...

How many different ways could this upcoming movie (a remake of a 2002 Hong Kong thriller, Jian gui) go wrong on disability? Somewhere there's a disability studies student giddy with the possibilities in this IMDB blurb:

In The Eye, Jessica Alba stars as Sydney Wells, an accomplished concert violinist who has been blind since childhood. Undergoing a double corneal transplant, Sydney's sight is restored -- but her happiness is short-lived, as unexplainable shadowy and frightening images begin to haunt her. Are they a product of her imagination or horrifyingly real? While her doctor (Alessandro Nivola) and sister (Parker Posey) start to question her sanity, Sydney is soon convinced that her anonymous eye donor has somehow opened the door to a terrifying world only she can now see.

December 28: Elizabeth Ware Packard (1816-1897)

"Thus the most sensible people on earth are exposed to suffer a life-long imprisonment, from the folly of some undeveloped, misguided person. And the tendency of imprisonment itself is sadly detrimental to a person who has intelligence enough to realize that he is held under lock and key. To persist in treating them as though they were unable to take care of themselves is to undermine self-reliance and self-respect. In short, it tends to destroy all that which is noble and aspiring in humanity..."

--Elizabeth Packard, The Prisoners' Hidden Life [1868], p. 248

Nineteenth-century American patients' rights advocate Elizabeth Ware Packard (portrait at left) was born on this date in 1816. Her pastor husband had her committed to the Illinois state lunatic asylum in 1860, because she was argumentative and disagreed with him on religious matters. Three years later, she was discharged, but it took a court case (Packard v. Packard) to determine that she should not be confined to her home.

Mrs. Packard went on to work for better legal protections for asylum inmates, like the right to send and receive mail; for more oversight of asylum superintendents; and for married women to have the same protections as others under commitment laws. She published her story and her positions in several books, which are available online.

A play and a museum exhibit earlier this year in New Jersey both focused on Packard's personal story and public career.

November 15: Charlotte Mew (1869-1928)

English writer Charlotte Mew was born on this date in 1869, in London. Her sister Freda was institutionalized at age 19, in an asylum on the Isle of Wight, and remained there almost 60 years, until her death in 1958. Their brother Henry also died in a lunatic asylum in 1901, at the age of 35. Charlotte and her other sister Anne believed they might also become mad: "She and her sister had both made up their minds early in life that they would never marry for fear of passing on the mental taint that was in their heredity," wrote a friend. To another friend, Charlotte described her own "queer uncertain mind." Charlotte Mew died by suicide in 1928. This is one of her poems about madness, segregation, and stigma, and the belief that disability was "the incarnate wages of man's sin":

On The Asylum Road

Theirs is the house whose windows---every pane---
Are made of darkly stained or clouded glass:
Sometimes you come upon them in the lane,
The saddest crowd that you will ever pass.

But still we merry town or village folk
Throw to their scattered stare a kindly grin,
And think no shame to stop and crack a joke
With the incarnate wages of man's sin.

None but ourselves in our long gallery we meet,
The moor-hen stepping from her reeds with dainty feet,
The hare-bell bowing on its stem,
Dance not with us; their pulses beat
To fainter music; nor do we to them
Make their life sweet.

The gayest crowd that they will ever pass
Are we to brother-shadows in the lane:
Our windows, too, are clouded glass
To them, yes, every pane!

Next Week in London: Journeys into Madness, 1850-1930

From the H-Net Announcements digest:

Journeys Into Madness: The Representation of Mental Illness in the Arts and Sciences , 1850-1930

The conference Journeys into Madness: Representing Mental Illness in the Arts and Sciences, 1850-1930 will take place at the Wellcome Collection Conference Centre, London, on 11 and 12 October 2007. This conference has been supported by the University of Plymouth, the Wellcome Trust and the British Academy. To book your place, please contact Gemma Blackshaw. Payment can be sent electronically or by post.

The program includes papers on "male hysteria," the rest cure, asylum photography, German psychiatry, patients' writings, farm work, art brut, avant-garde film, asylum art, trauma... check it out. Even when I can't possibly attend, I love looking at conference programs, seeing who's doing what...

New book: Geoffrey Reaume, "Lyndhurst"

News in the inbox today about Canadian disability historian Geoffrey Reaume's new book, Lyndhurst: Canada's First Rehabilitation Centre for People with Spinal Cord Injuries, 1945-1998 (McGill-Queens University Press 2007). Reaume is an assistant professor at York University, where he teaches Mad People's History in the Critical Disability Studies MA program. He's one of the organizers of the Psychiatric Survivor Archives of Toronto. His previous book, Remembrance of Patients Past (Oxford University Press 2000), explores patient life at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane.

About Lyndhurst, from the publisher's website:

Only recently have the voices of the disabled - the personal experiences of people with disabilities - been included in medical history. Lyndhurst marks an important contribution to disability and medical history by providing first-person accounts of patients, staff, and disability activists at Lyndhurst Lodge in Toronto in post-war Canada.

Lyndhurst was the first facility in Canada to focus solely on people with spinal cord injuries, eventually also treating people with related disabilities, such as polio. Geoffrey Reaume details the changes in treatment of paraplegia and quadriplegia that allowed more people to survive and to return to the community, the evolution of social policies that emphasized greater inclusiveness in society for people with physical disabilities, and the role of disability activism in helping to advance these changes.

Lyndhurst is the first Canadian history to trace these developments through the mid to late twentieth century. It is a timely reminder of the past role of government, the health care sector, and disability activists in shaping disability social policies.

Liz Spikol's "Mad in America" book discussion

DS, TU readers may be interested to join blogger Liz Spikol as she reads and discusses the book Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill by journalist Robert Whitaker. She's planning to have an online discussion at her blog on July 13, and on that evening readers are invited to Spikol's place of employment (the offices of the Philadelphia Weekly) for a face-to-face discussion (with cookies!). RSVP to Liz if you're planning to attend the Philadelphia discussion; or if you're not in the area, just read the book and plan to visit The Trouble with Spikol on July 13 to talk about it.

May 5: Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Cochrane!

Another disability history birthday for today. Elizabeth Cochrane, better known by the name she used in her bylines, "Nellie Bly," was born on this date in 1864, in western Pennsylvania. She was a journalist with a knack for publicity and a strong interest in reform. In one of her undercover investigations, she posed as a madwoman to gain entrance to Blackwell Island, New York City's lunatic asylum, to report on conditions there. The full text of the resulting book, Ten Days in a Mad-House, is available online here; her stories about inmate treatment at Blackwell prompted a state investigation of the facility, and ultimately reforms to its practices.