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Anecdotal evidence of the testimonies of patients who received treatments for sexual deviations and medical attitudes towards them are scattered in the recorded accounts of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, intersex and queer/questioning (GLBTIQ) people. This book examines the plight of men who were institutionalised in British mental hospitals to receive 'treatment' for homosexuality and transvestism, and the perceptions and actions of the men and women who nursed them. It explores why the majority of the nurses followed orders in administering the treatment - in spite of the zero success-rate in 'straightening out' queer men - but also why a small number surreptitiously defied their superiors by engaging in fascinating subversive behaviours. The book is specifically about the treatments developed for sexual deviations in the UK. Transvestism was also treated fairly widely; however, not to the same extent as homosexuality. After an examination of the oppression and suppression of the sexual deviant, the introduction of aversion therapies for sexual deviance is considered. During the 1930s-1950s, mental health care witnessed a spirit of 'therapeutic optimism' as new somatic treatments and therapies were introduced in mental hospitals. The book also examines the impact these had on the role of mental nurses and explores how such treatments may have essentially normalised nurses to implement painful and distressing 'therapeutic' interventions . The book interprets the testimonies of these 'subversive nurses'. Finally, it explores the inception of 'nurse therapists' and discusses their role in administering aversion therapy.
under psychiatric geneticist Franz Kallmann explored these questions at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) Department of Medical Genetics. Their mental health project for deaf people established genetic and mental health care services that – for the first time in the US – considered deaf people a social minority who should receive care in their own, native sign language. Today, such health care services that consider the specific needs of linguistic or cultural minorities are relatively common in the US. Fifty years ago, however, this was a novelty
hospital is where the action is.4 This chapter briefly examines the origins and development of DGH units, and the concept of DGH psychiatry espoused by Kessel. It explores how the units in general, and Withington in particular, are situated within the broader history of post-war mental health care. Given their importance in policy terms, it is surprising that so little has been written about them. To date, the historiography has been particularly silent about their nurses. This chapter recognises that nurses were central to the running of the Withington unit, and seeks
, 1916–19’, 33–40. 143 Reid, Broken Men , 24; Long, Destigmatising Mental Illness? , 4. 144 Alice Brumby, ‘From “Pauper Lunatics” to “Rate-Aided Patients”: Removing the Stigma of Mental Health Care, 1888–1938’ (PhD Thesis, University of Huddersfield, 2015), 11
with it argued for psychiatry’s reform, not its abolition. Following John Foot’s work on Franco Basaglia, this chapter understands ‘antipsychiatry’ as a radical movement within psychiatry, critiquing the theories, diagnoses and practices employed in psychiatry before the 1960s. John Foot, The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care (London: Verso, 2015). 38 R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family (first published
.’ 1 The discourse of human rights has a long genealogy in relation to the treatment of persons with mental illness and has become a central narrative in the transnational networks and activities which have come to be characterized as global mental health. Indeed, appeals to the human rights of persons with mental illness have formed a moral argument for intervention to improve mental health care worldwide (Patel, Saraceno and Kleinman, 2006 ). The reform of mental health law in Ghana would seem to be of
The Mansions in the Orchard project, funded by a Wellcome Trust People Award for Public Engagement, ran from September 2013 to March 2015. On behalf of the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, the authors carried out new historical research and documentation, alongside public engagement activities. The project addressed the largely undocumented twentieth-century history of inpatient mental health care in Britain through the
policy, A Vision for Change (Expert Group on Mental Health Policy, 2006: 48), also highlighted this group, noting that the mental health needs of specific groups such as refugees, asylum-seekers and ‘other immigrant populations will be addressed by the provision of comprehensive mental health services that are based on care planning taking all the needs of the individual into account’. How does this altered pattern of mental health need among migrants and non-native populations translate into access to mental health care and, specifically, rates of involuntary
interesting link between efforts to resolve the early NHS staffing crisis in mental hospitals (informed by parallel initiatives across other branches of nursing) and the emergence of a distinctive critique of the asylum as a past, present and future locus of mental health care that had no counterpoint in discussions about other hospital facilities. It is, however, evident that the institutional model of care remained dominant, with the 1960s and early 1970s paradoxically seeing both a commitment to alternative models of service delivery and major investments in new and
within the National Asylum Workers’ Union (NAWU).5 Both scandals concerned the care and management of male asylum patients, not the vulnerable madwoman identified by Showalter. In turn, the scandals affected the status of psychiatric nurses and perceptions of mental illness and asylum patients. Analysis of these scandals illustrates how occupational struggles between different professional groups within the field of mental health care were fuelled in part by conflicting representations of mental illness, and in turn could generate stigmatising discourses which