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

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

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

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

Health and place in historical perspective: medicine, ethnicity, and colonial identities

Introduction to special issue. This Special Issue includes articles first presented as papers at a two-day symposium held at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, in February 2011. The event was designed to highlight a large Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden-funded research project, and to showcase current scholarly work in the field of the colonial and postcolonial histories of medicine, with a focus on histories of insanity. We also included the themes of medical migration in New Zealand’s national history, the movement of medical ideas and personnel across empire, a close study of the uses of the term ‘neurasthenia’ in French-colonial Vietnam, and the relationship between place, plants, and health across South Asia and Australia in the nineteenth century

Editorial Introduction: The utility and futility of 'the nation' in histories of Aotearoa New Zealand.

An introduction is presented which discusses articles in the issue on New Zealand history, including one on interracial rape and sexual violence in the 1860s, one on postcolonial methodology and the historical concept of the British World, and one on Whanganui Māori claims to the Whanganui River

Mental health at Tokanui in the early years

Tokanui was the first hospital to be built entirely to the villa design, and as such, its physically separate wards presented considerable opportunity for the classification and treatment of patients. Piecing together information contained in the remaining records, this chapter describes the formative years at Tokanui, during which not only a hospital, but also a community was established. The narrative which follows tells of buildings erected, land broken, cultivated and beautified, of hard physical labour and trying conditions. Above all, it is a narrative of the people who worked and lived, however fleetingly, at Tokanui and without whom the hospital would not have had a purpose. As the first new hospital to be built after provincial time, Tokanui, in many respects, led the way in developments made in the accommodation and treatment of the psychiatrically ill and those with intellectual disability

Partnerships and Pedagogy: Transforming the BA Online

[EN] There has been much written recently round the “digital revolution” of universities (Nascimento Cunha et al., 2020). Indeed, in 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the need for universities to adapt and adopt new technological tools for teaching and learning, as both the global world we live in changed, and as students adapted to the continually evolving digital landscape. The BA Online is a new interdisciplinary online presence for the humanities and social sciences, and includes a focus on constructive alignment, innovative learning objects, and social learning. The semester-long courses were built as a supported social learning experience that is purposefully constructed with a narrative. This article reveals how the BA Online project was realised through the use of partnerships, particularly that of the university learning designers who worked very closely with both the online learning platform FutureLearn and academic staff in curriculum design and course transformation.Lloyd, C.; Herb, A.; Kilmister, M.; Coleborne, C. (2021). Partnerships and Pedagogy: Transforming the BA Online. En 7th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'21). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 925-932. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAd21.2021.13001OCS92593

Regulating \u27Mobility\u27 and Masculinity through Institutions in Colonial Victoria, 1870s-1890s

David Rollison shows us that ‘mobility’ and ‘settlement’ operated in a dynamic and dialectical relationship in the past. Mobility, he argues, was a force for social change. Social institutions in early modern England, such as families, the Law, and the Church, were not immobile in the face of new populations. Travellers, sojourners, internal migrants and strangers moved through ‘settled’ spaces and featured in everyday life. ‘Thus movement,’ Rollison shows, ‘was literally the necessary condition of the abiding, settled, “structure”’ (Rollison 1999: 10)