Introduction: Changing times, changing places

This history of Tokanui Hospital and mental health services in the Waikato is a collection of the different stories of the many members of that community. We have chosen to tell these stories through the eyes of several writers, with some of them perhaps even competing perspectives, hoping to capture close to the full range of responses to and experiences of mental health in the Waikato over time. Tokanui Hospital- for a time, the main focus of mental health services in the region - was itself plural and complex. Through our collectively authored history, we show how the closure of Tokanui impacted upon its many residents and staff and the wider community around the hospital, and how the dispersal of mental health functions into the community has continued to evoke resounding memories of Tokanui

Families, insanity and the psychiatric institution in Australia and New Zealand, 1860-1914

International historians have begun to challenge the view that the nineteenth-century psychiatric hospital was a place of horrors and custody, and have shown that families were sometimes intimate with the institutions of the past, often participating in the process of institutional committal. This article explores the state of historical inquiry into families and insanity in Australia and New Zealand. It asserts that by re-examining patient cases we might find fresh insights into the dynamic between families and mental health. Through a close examination of archival sources, the article argues, we can see the presence of families ‘inside’ the asylum in several ways. Overall, the article suggests that institutional archives present both opportunity and risk for historians intent on discovering ‘what happened’ to the insane and their families

Insanity, gender and empire: women living a 'loose kind of life' on the colonial institutional margins, 1870-1910

This article examines how female immigrants were characterised inside the Yarra Bend Asylum in Melbourne, Victoria (Hospital for the Insane after 1905), once they slipped into the world of the institutionally ‘hidden.’ Forms of social difference inside colonial institutions for the insane were embedded in patient case records. This article argues that through a closer examination of cases of female immigrants, we might find out more about gender relations in colonial situations. In particular, this article returns to ideas about women patients and constructions of these women through case records to uncover new interpretations of this material in the Australasian context. To do this, it sets out specific ways of reading patient cases and teases out the importance of these frameworks for making some kind of synthesis of the ways in which institutionalised people—already at the margins of society—were further marginalised inside institutional populations through specific practices. It examines immigrant women in the hospitals for the insane; the cases of women designated as living so-called ‘loose’ lives who also ended up inside the institution for the insane; and finally, concludes with a commentary about the descriptive power of cases and the production of concepts of gender, class, and race difference within their pages

Review: A Sadly Trouble History: The Meanings of Suicide in the Modern Age

The article reviews the book “A Sadly Trouble History: The Meanings of Suicide in the Modern Age”, By John Weaver

Public Opinion on Marine Protected Areas

The following results are based on a survey conducted by WWF-Canada to find out more about Canadians' opinions about marine protected areas

Ethnic Minority Personnel Careers: Hindrances and Hopes

Personnel departments often have particular responsibility for equal opportunities within their organizations. This paper explores equal opportunities within personnel departments themselves, in relation to the careers of ethnic minority personnel practitioners. Through primary research, it identifies a range of criteria which can affect personnel careers, of which ethnic origin is often one. However, although being categorized as of ethnic minority origin often hinders personnel careers, the paper reveals that it is sometimes possible for individuals who are so categorized to overcome that negative effect through demonstrating some of those other criteria. Thus, the paper suggests, it is not just organisational equal opportunities practices which may provide hope for ethnic minority personnel careers but also – and perhaps more importantly – the actions of the ethnic minority individuals themselves. Ways in which personnel departments might support these actions are discussed

A Language for Ontological Nihilism

According to ontological nihilism there are, fundamentally, no individuals. Both natural languages and standard predicate logic, however, appear to be committed to a picture of the world as containing individual objects. This leads to what I call the \emph{expressibility challenge} for ontological nihilism: what language can the ontological nihilist use to express her account of how matters fundamentally stand? One promising suggestion is for the nihilist to use a form of \emph{predicate functorese}, a language developed by Quine. This proposal faces a difficult objection, according to which any theory in predicate functorese will be a notational variant of the corresponding theory stated in standard predicate logic. Jason Turner (2011) has provided the most detailed and convincing version of this objection. In the present paper, I argue that Turner's case for the notational variance thesis relies on a faulty metasemantic principle and, consequently, that an objection long thought devastating is in fact misguided

Patient journeys: Stories of mental health care from Tokanui to mental health services, 1930s to the 1980s

This chapter is concerned with finding out about mental health patients - taking this term at the outset - and exploring how their stories might be found in different places from 1912. It considers, then, the shifting identities of patients over time, as well as exploring issues around how historians might productively locate stories and narratives of mental illness, hospitalisation, recovery, and sometimes, cycles of these. Overall, it situates Tokanui patients in a wider framework for mental health histories in New Zealand and seeks to find their stories among the many accounts of mental illness. Where the previous chapter considered changing modalities for treatment, and told patient stories sensitively to capture this from the perspective of a practising psychiatrist, this chapter is written from the point of patients, but also mediated by the view of the historian. It therefore asks readers to think about the ways we tell stories of mental health, as much as about the stories themselves

Observations in a sediment-laden flow by use of laser-doppler velocimetry

The laser-Doppler velocimetry technique was adapted for use in sediment-laden flows. The developed instrumentation was used to make one-dimensional, instantaneous measurements of both fluid and sediment grain velocities throughout the water column in such a flow. The velocimetry results were obtained in a steady, uniform flow over a natural sediment bed in the high-transport, flat bed regime. Laser-Doppler velocimetry is particularly attractive for use in sediment-laden flows as no calibration is required and no probe is introduced into the flow field. Measurements of the fluid velocity and the occurrence and velocity of individual sediment grains are possible with the instrumentation developed in this study. The major difficulties encountered are the possible conditional sampling, hence possible biasing, of the fluid velocity data and the failure of the instrumentation to record or resolve individual sediment grains at higher sediment transport rates. The instrumentation employed in this study is still in the developmental stages and suggestions for its improvement are given. Despite the difficulties encountered, the data obtained in this study give some insights into the mechanics of suspension and entrainment of sediment during transport by water. The longitudinal turbulence intensity does not seem to be significantly affected by the presence of suspended sediment; the turbulence intensities observed in the sediment-laden flow of this study do not differ greatly from the values reported by previous investigators for clear fluid flows. The mean and standard deviation of the sediment grain velocity were observed to be less than those for the fluid velocity in the lower portion of the flow, but respectively greater near the water surface. The data demonstrate the shortcoming of the continuum approach to the mechanics of the suspension on sediment. The length (or time) scales of the fluid turbulence are smaller than the length (or time) scale of a set of sediment grains required to define suspended sediment concentration. Near the water surface, where the velocimeter acts as a grain counter, the probability density functions of the sediment grain inter-arrival times, the time between the detection of successive sediment grains, were observed to be negative exponentials. The transport of individual sediment grains might be modeled as a Poisson process. This work is the foundation of an ongoing experimental program of direct measurements of the fine-scale, time-fluctuating characteristics of sediment-laden flows. This study developed and implemented instrumentation capable of making such measurements and established a conceptual framework for the subsequent interpretation of the data obtained. Two-dimensional measurements, with improved instrumentation, will give additional insights into the mechanics of sediment transport