Catharine Coleborne
Trained as a historian, I have been writing about aspects of the history of madness and institutions for around 20 years. I was drawn to this because I was interested in the way people talked about experiences of mental breakdown in the past, and how their words were then put into clinical language. I have written about that in my book Madness in the Family (2010) which is about Australia and New Zealand. My earlier scholarship had a focus on the nineteenth-century hospitals in Australia and New Zealand which were shaped by the processes of colonialism. My work has raised questions about how institutions reflected colonial society’s anxieties and preoccupations, and how in turn these societies in formation produced institutional populations. In particular, my research has sought to address the interactions of patients, families and the cultures of institutions.
Over time, I have also increasingly been drawn into more contemporary projects about mental health which have presented new and different challenges. For the past decade or more, historians and cultural theorists have examined the problem of ‘madness’, stimulated by the pace and scope of deinstitutionalisation, mental health advocacy, failures of policy and practice, the action research mode of disability studies, and the rise of the mad movement. My own forays into the scholarship of ‘mad’ histories are necessarily limited due to my in-between status as an academic historian, rather than an insider.
It was during my academic work in New Zealand that my ideas about the present context for writing the histories of mental illness began to shape new research questions and directions. I am grateful to the team of mental health professionals, postgraduate students, and colleagues who helped me grow new ideas in that context. I thank especially mental health advocate Mary O’Hagan, who generously offered her time to me. An abbreviated interview with Mary was published as Mary O’Hagan, ‘Madness in New Zealand’ in Asylum: The Magazine for Democratic Psychiatry, 24:2 (2017). My international colleagues in histories of mental illness, health and institutions have been profoundly important to my intellectual development. Colleagues in Canada and the UK have always been ready to offer critical and stimulating feedback. My role in this team is to share thinking about oral history interviewing, to help write pieces and provide intellectual support, to be part of some interview conversations, and to find ways to bring my own insights as a historian to the wider team.