History Now, Ep 4: Histories of Mental Health

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Historians Professor Catharine Coleborne and Dr James Dunk discuss the depth of historical writing about mental illness in Australia and reflect on its resonance in the present moment; how can we write the history of mental health now?
Chair:  Dr Effie Karageorgos

This event is held in partnership with the University of Newcastle’s Future of Madness Network.

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Episode Transcript

Dr Effie Karageorgos (00:06):
Hello everyone, good afternoon,
welcome.
I think we'll make a start now.
I'm Effie Karageorgos, so I'mhere replacing well, I'm
chairing this session, but I'malso I've got two roles tonight.
I'm replacing our illustriousprogram director of History Now,
J jesse Adams Stein, who's nothere tonight.
I'm replacing our illustriousprogram director of history now,

(00:27):
jessie Adam-Stein, who's nothere tonight.
So first I'll be introducinghistory now as a series, and
then I'll be introducing ourspeakers and chairing the
session on the histories ofmental health.
Before I start, I'd just liketo acknowledge the land upon
which we're holding this event,which is the land of the Gadigal
people.
I want to pay respects toelders, past and present, and I

(00:47):
want to acknowledge that theselands have never been ceded.
So, before I transform into thechair for this specific event,
I want to say a few things aboutHistory Now.
So I'm reading a script thathas been given to me, apologies.
History Now is a long-runningpublic history talk series with
the aim to bring what you mightcall cutting-edge historical
practice into public discourse.

(01:08):
The vibe of the event is candidand conversational, featuring
professional and academichistorians and history-related
experts.
History Now has had severaliterations, organisers and homes
over the years.
It's sometimes been run inperson and it went online during
COVID.
Of course, and this year, in2024, history now is being

(01:30):
coordinated by Jesse Adam Stein,Dr Jesse Adam Stein, who is
history council of New SouthWales vice president and a
member of the Australian Centrefor Public History.
At UTS, we have venue supportfrom the State Library of New
South Wales.
Thank you, and there's a wholelist of other people to thank,
which I'll do at the end.
In History Now 2024, we havenine sessions.

(01:51):
We started in March and thefinal one is in November, and
you can find out about all ofthose on the website.
There's a full event program.
It's on the History Councilwebsite and the Australian
Centre for Public Historywebsite.
Okay, so I'm now going totransform into the chair for
this specific event.
Thank you everyone.
So I'm Effie Karageorgos.

(02:12):
I'm a lecturer in history atthe University of Newcastle.
I studied the social history ofwar, specifically focusing on
protest histories of psychiatry,protest histories of psychiatry
, violence, war trauma, and Iwas so happy to be asked to
chair tonight, today's session,which, of course, is going to be
Professor Catherine Colburn andDr James Dunke speaking to you

(02:35):
about the histories of mentalhealth.
C Kathy and Jamie are scholarswhose work I have long admired
and who I'm very lucky to haveworked and work alongside in a
range of ways.
They are certainly two of themore inspired historians of
mental health in this country.
I'm not sucking up to you both.
I actually do believe this.

(02:57):
I met them both at the Historyof Psychiatry Winter School held
at the University of Sydney andorganised by Professors Hans
Polz and Mark McKayley in 2018,when Cathy generously came to
speak to our group of HDRs andhigh degree research students
and early career researchers atthe Winter School.

(03:18):
Cathy and Jamie met in the sameyear, I believe, through the
Australian HistoricalAssociation's Copyright Agency
Bursary Mentorship Scheme, whichled to Jamie working alongside
Cathy to create the Universityof Newcastle Future of Madness
Network in 2019.
, and he also holds an honoraryposition at the University of

(03:39):
Newcastle Castle.
Since then, they and myselfalso have been involved in a
range of Future of MadnessNetwork related events,
including Pictures of Madnessfor the History Council of New
South Wales History Week in 2019.
Actually, that was in 2020, notin 2019, sorry and a forum on
admissions, new voices in mental, organised by Jamie in 2022.

(04:04):
Cathy and Jamie wereresponsible for the incredible
special issue of HistoryAustralia Journal in 2022
entitled Bringing Madness infrom the Margins Mental Illness
and Historical Change and,incidentally, includes a
fantastic article aboutdeinstitutionalisation by Hans
Polz and Dr Robin Donlop, whichlast year was the most

(04:24):
downloaded article in HistoryAustralia, which is fantastic.
It shows the ongoing interestin histories of mental health.
I think Cathy and Jamie havealso both ably served as
presidents of the Australian andNew Zealand Society for the
History of Medicine, so we seeseveral years of fruitful
collaboration and cooperationbetween tonight's speakers and

(04:45):
work that has contributedsignificantly to the way we see
Australian histories of mentalhealth today.
So after that CKarraghe-Georges,I'm going to introduce our
first speaker, who is ProfessorCatherine Colbin.
So Cathy will speak and thenJamie will speak and then we

(05:06):
will open the floor up toquestions.
Okay, and hopefully you know,start a bit of a discussion.
So Professor Colbin is ahistorian at the University of
Newcastle in New South Wales.
She's written histories ofmental health and institutions,

(05:28):
colonial families and health,and museums and museums,
collections and exhibitions ofpsychiatric histories and
objects.
She is the co-editor withMatthew Smith from Strathclyde
University of a successful bookseries with over 30 titles since
2014, called Mental Health inHistorical Perspective.
In 2020, she published a shortbook as part of that series

(05:51):
called why Talk About Madness.
This book is designed toprovide readers with an entry
point to the large and sprawlingfield of the history of mental
illness in institutions.
With Dr Effie Carragiorgia, sheis pursuing a new history of
mental health aftercare.
With Dr Evie Carragiorgis, sheis pursuing a new history of
mental health aftercare fundedby the Australian Research
Council, and together they leadthe Future of Madness Research
Network.
Catherine's most recent bookexamines the histories of

(06:13):
colonial vagrancy and hasrecently been released Vagrant
Lives in Colonial AustralasiaRegulating Mobility 1840 to 1910
, which was published byBloomsbury.
So I'm going to hand over toCathy.
Thank you, applause.

Professor Catharine Colbo (06:35):
Thank you so much, E effie.
Oh lovely, aren't you good?
Thank you for that reallylovely, warm introduction and
thank you so much much everybodyfor being here this evening.
I understand it got a littlecooler and windier outside after
I arrived here at the library,so really appreciate it.
And thanks to the historycouncil and our sponsors.
Um, I too would like toacknowledge the gadigal people

(06:57):
on whose lands we are thisevening and pay my respects to
elders past and present.
Uh, I'm delighted to speakalongside Dr James Dunk, known
as Jamie, and I hope together wecan really get a good
conversation going.
So where I'd like to start thisevening is to reflect on my
scholarship in the socialhistory of mental illness or

(07:17):
madness over time, especially inrelation to Australian social
and cultural history.
How has madness featured inAustralia's past, particularly
from its settler, colonial past,and how has my own thinking
changed since I began to conductresearch in this field?

(07:38):
And in reflecting on all ofthis, I hope to point to some
ways in which I think we think,hopefully in conversation, we
could be writing this historynow, and I know Jamie will push
the boundaries a little bit more, both in his wonderful
collection of images and alsohis ideas in his talk.
So I see my role as setting upthis conversation.

(07:59):
Just a note on language.
You'll notice we use the termmadness this is a word that as
many of you I'm sure do know,has been reclaimed by the mad
studies movement and we use itself-consciously and also the
word asylum, which is a wordthat appears in some of the book
titles that I'll be talkingabout, and there are a couple of

(08:19):
images that you know.
Depending on your ownperspective, you might find a
little more confronting.
The knowledge I want to sharein my talk will include glimpses
, but not a full picture, ofwhat the foundational
scholarship in the field inAustralia has told us.

(08:40):
Overall, my narrative suggeststhat there's been a shift in
historical thinking about thespace of the institution of the
asylum, and here is one from NewSouth Wales Gladesville
Hospital, from its earliestbeginnings in the landscape of
colonial New South Wales throughto a much deeper engagement

(09:02):
with communities of care andpractice emerging in the
appreciation of the livedexperience of mental illness and
mental breakdown.
So, moving from thatinstitutional perspective and I
think one of the earliest piecesof scholarship on an
institution in New South Waleswas WD Neill's Asylum at Castle
Hill.
So Effie mentioned my book whyTalk About Madness?

(09:24):
And if any of you have lookedat this short book, you'll know
that I've always been reallyinterested in illness and
illness narratives, and sothat's my starting point this
evening.
During my master's research,where I focused on early modern
British history, particularlyEnglish women and life cycles
using medical and other writings, I was really fascinated by how
women's illnesses weredescribed in midwives' manual,

(09:44):
medical and other writings.
I was really fascinated by howwomen's illnesses were described
in midwives' manuals and otherwritings and, interestingly, I
came across some first-personaccounts of mental breakdown in
the 17th century, and so thatreally has been an entry point
for me personally as a historian.
Similar accounts, wherever Icould find them, in whatever

(10:05):
format, have formed the basis ofmy reflections on the history
of madness.
The words of people in the pastand my love of archival
research always stay with me.
When I began my PhD at La TrobeUniversity in 1993, I made a
decision to focus my attentionon Australian history and move

(10:25):
from British history rather thancontinuing in that early modern
historical period as aresearcher, and I remember
making a really personaldecision that I wanted to focus
on histories of our own place.
I also moved universities atthat point.
At the time I was veryinfluenced by Aboriginal
histories and writing andliterature about investigating

(10:47):
what it meant for whitehistorians to write about
Aboriginal history.
I had many friends who wereresearching and writing in those
fields and it was also a timeand of course, when is it not a
time when delineating one'sfocus for research was highly
political and it seemed to methat I didn't have enough
experience as an undergraduatecoming through in Australian

(11:08):
history.
I didn't have enough experiencein thinking about those
particular issues and I thinkthis is an important point about
positionality and identity thatI might come back to towards
the end of my talk.
Another point here is that Iwasn't trained formally in the
history of medicine and it is areally vibrant field and has

(11:28):
grown over time with medicaleducation.
When I say vibrant, it's beenreinvented over time and I think
that's important because I'vespent most of my career inside
that tent one way or another andI've engaged with international
colleagues and scholarship,largely defined by the subfield
of historical writing of thesocial history of medicine.
But what I did have at that timewas a strength in feminist and

(11:51):
gender history.
I'd taken a feminist historycourse with Pat Grimshaw at the
University of Melbourne.
In my honours year and by thetime I commenced my PhD I was
surrounded by a very stronggroup of women scholars at La
Trobe who were all writingfeminist history topics for
their PhDs.
It's quite profound when Ithink about it now.
It was a very strong group ofus.
So I turned in those earlyyears to gender as my category

(12:16):
of analysis to think aboutillness in the past, my vast
British history reading helpedme because I'd come across a
wonderful book by a scholarcalled Michael MacDonald who
wrote about 17th centuryphysicians describing sorry, a
17th century physician whodescribed mental illness and
mental breakdown.
And I was also because of thatBritish history reading and

(12:39):
being steeped in those kinds ofwell from 17th and 18th century
onwards, really I developed areal fascination with
institutions and so manyscholars were writing histories
of institutional life and carein Britain.
And at the time scholars werealso very preoccupied with

(12:59):
Elaine Showalter's propositionof 1985 in the Femalemality that
women were more likely to beconfined as mad, and she also
talked about madness asconstrued as being aligned with
femininity, and this is an ideathat was challenged over the
years, particularly by NewZealand historians, I have to
say, but also others writingabout a more complex field of

(13:23):
gender in the institution,others writing about a more
complex field of gender in theinstitution.
So, as I said, there were manyindividual asylums that became
the subject of history writingin England and Scotland in
particular and Roy Porter, whowould later become an examiner
of my doctorate, had of coursewritten on every single topic in
the field of the social historyof medicine, including madness,

(13:44):
and I'd also read histories ofthe asylum in France and
American scholarship.
It was always very appealingand influential for me, and
particularly early Americanscholarship that looked at
institutional demographicpatterns, institutional cultures
and regimes, and I think it wasmy international reading in the
field that became a signaturefor my work and really helped me

(14:05):
see the larger scholarlycommunity, something that's
enabled my career, and if anyonehere is pursuing a PhD, I think
it's really important to steepyourself in international
literature.
But there was also quite a lotof work in Australia and I also
read very deeply and widely.
There were early histories ofpsychiatry and institutions that
I've mentioned, read verydeeply and widely.

(14:25):
There were early histories ofpsychiatry and institutions that
I've mentioned WD, neal onCastle Hill and other similar
examples, things that were kindof more popular.
I guess for institutionalcommissioned history writing is
something that popped up all thetime in my research
Administrative histories such asMilton Lewis writing about
managing madness, bits andpieces of scholarship about WA,

(14:51):
south Australia, tasmania verylittle on Tasmania, I have to
say and Queensland and historieswritten by psychiatrists
reflecting on their life andwork.
So my understanding of thisfield grew and grew and started
to mushroom the more I engagedwith all of this work.
It was also shaped by the workof Jill Julius Matthews, who

(15:11):
wrote about women at theGlenside Asylum in South
Australia in the 20th century,interestingly in her book Good
and Mad Women, and StephenGarton's impressive and
important work, which I thinkhas shaped all of our work in
this field.
Medicine and Madness also usedgender as a way of thinking
about psychiatric, institutionalpopulations and patient
demography.
So here you can imagine mebeing a postgraduate student

(15:33):
just soaking all of this up.
I now had the perfect kind ofshaping devices to look at how
gender played out in aninstitutional setting, using sex
difference as a way ofphysically separating
populations inside institutionalconfines.
That's how asylums did it, butalso gender in discourses of

(15:54):
medicine, and madness lentitself to this kind of analysis
of how women and men were talkedabout, treated and understood
inside the world of institutions, and I was able then to kind of
use that as a way to get insideall the dimensions and dynamics
of institutional culture andlife.
I still feel like I could keepdoing that forever.

(16:17):
There's so much to say here.
I was also really interested intrying to get at experience.
How do people experience mentalbreakdown and confinement?
But experience was and is aproblematic term in historical
research and writing.
What does it mean to get atexperience?
How do we fully get inside thepast and appreciate what it

(16:38):
means to do that or to talkabout experience?
And of course it's verydifficult experience, and of
course it's very difficult.
So I found my way by readingagainst the grain, looking for
patient resistance and thevoices of the confined.
Another influence then on me wasthinking about the idea that we
could look at texts andtextuality in a

(16:59):
post-structuralist account ofsources in the archive, really
prioritising language ratherthan narrative.
And I became really interestedin the archive, really
prioritising language ratherthan narrative.
And I became really interestedin the idea of case notes as
shifting narratives, storiescapturing people inside the
asylum case books, the result ofall of this was my PhD, and it

(17:19):
became a book a little bit lateron called Reading Madness,
which focused on women at theYarra Bend Asylum in Melbourne
in the 19th century but alsoreferred to models of
masculinity along the way, and Itried as much as possible to
point to women's resistance butalso forms of writing and
representation of mentalbreakdown, through first person

(17:42):
accounts but also officialinquiries.
So coming through that processof writing a thesis at that time
, which was a significant erafor feminist and gender history,
meant that I was able toreflect on what gender might add
to the history of madness.
But I began to see thelimitations of gender as the
sole category of analysis,because of course there are many

(18:02):
, also many other kinds ofpeople confined in institutions
the plight, for example, of solewhite men on the colonial
frontier, men Stephen Gartonalso wrote about who were living
alone and experienced isolationand lack of family support.
Chinese men who came for golddigging, excitement and

(18:24):
enterprise and ended up isolatedand alone and disconnected and
perhaps suffering racism andviolence.
All kinds of people on thecolonial frontier and in the
colonial world, non-white people, including indigenous peoples,
and I'll come to that in amoment.
So it followed then that age,physical disability, physical
illness, general health werealso important aspects of this

(18:47):
inquiry.
Now just a little sidebar note Ispent a lot of my career in New
Zealand and it was there that Ireally came to grips with what
it might mean to talk aboutcolonised populations through
the work of wonderfulpostgraduate students,
particularly Maori populationsat Auckland Asylum, and I think

(19:07):
at that time I was able then tore-read Australian literature
and find more that people hadwritten about the experiences of
Aboriginal people in some partsof Australia where they
appeared in institutionalpopulations, and at the end of
my talk I'll comment on this asa bit of a problematic that we
need to revisit.
There have also been some veryrich biographical accounts, just

(19:27):
a handful of individualAboriginal people who we can
find out more about throughtheir collision with
institutions, such as Tara Bobby, who was a Goonai man from
Gippsland.
He spent time at the Kew Asylumbut he was also at Coranderrk
and Ramayuk and he died in 1874.

(19:48):
So he spent his life in lots ofEuropean institutions but also
played a role with Europeans inother ways as well.
So there are some very deep andrich interesting stories.
So what did it mean to go madin the colonial period.
I moved on to a largerintellectual project to
investigate how we think aboutcolonial madness itself and of

(20:09):
course this is where Jamie'swork comes in.
He's worked about on the, theidea of early colonial New South
Wales and bedlam and madness,and explored that in in more
depth and particularlyimaginatively, interrogating
colonial madness, and there'snot really a very strong
chronology in the book coverscoming through here, but I'm

(20:31):
just kind of gesturing towardsthese kinds of works as I go.
So how did people cope whenthey fell on hard times, when
they experienced mentalbreakdown and ended up inside
institutions?
Did they have familiesadvocating for them?
If they did, who advocated andwhy and how?

(20:52):
How did they discuss issueswith institutional authorities,
including medicalsuperintendents or attendant
staff, the nursing staff andinstitutions?
What processes were put inplace to engage families,
particularly at a time whenthere was a huge fear that
colonial populations were veryatomised.
There was very little in theway of family networks in the

(21:12):
colonies.
So these ideas intersect withwelfare history and I turned to
my great passion really, whichwas and is work on families and
the way family members intervenein institutional care and
assist those who are confined.
And I think this whole theme,which really does kind of get

(21:32):
connected then to welfarehistory in Australia, has
allowed me to step into spacesof thinking about extra
institutional care, communitypsychiatry and community care.
So what I've given you now alittle bit focused on my work, I
realise, but the ambition I hadin doing that was to share with

(21:53):
you how I see Australianhistory unfolding and how I kind
of went along with that.
We can see the influences inthe narrative I've given you of
Australian history writing atlarge, moving from a social
control model of the institutionthat considered questions of
gender control, class andcriminality in constructs of

(22:15):
Australian social historywriting in the 1980s and 90s,
right through to thinking moreabout language, the linguistic
turn, texts and textuality inthe asylum records, through to
patient and family agency,multiple communities and
interactions, an increasinglyhighly mobile field of

(22:35):
engagement that we can see if welook at the asylum as being
part of wider society, so notseparate from and hidden away,
although 19th century asylumswere but actually connected to
and part of wider society.
There's been another strand ofresearch in Australia that I
want to talk about beforestarting to wind to my

(22:58):
conclusions and thoughts aboutwhere I think we're headed.
Thoughts about where I thinkwe're headed.
And in 2005, after a productivecollaboration, dolly McKinnon
and I published this bookMadness in Australia, and it was
an edited collection, containeda number of chapters, including
chapters about Dolly's ownwonderful work about soundscapes

(23:19):
of the asylum, hearing madness,people writing about built
heritage, people writing about20th century formulations of the
history of mental illness andwork on museums and collections.
It was my thinking, ourthinking, that if we moved
outside of the institution ofthe psychiatric hospital or the
asylum and into publicremembering, we could see the

(23:41):
way in which the residue andmemory of madness kind of
lingers and remains incontemporary society.
This book, I have to say, wasvery widely reviewed.
I think it was very impactfulfrom that point of view, in a
scholarly sense.
It was reviewed in every youknow places like Australian Book
Review, but also in psychologyjournals and nursing journals.

(24:03):
So it had that kind of reallynice landing that we wanted it
to have and I think the volumemarked a step change in thinking
about these topics inAustralian social and cultural
history.
There's a messiness around theidea of rupture in histories of
mental illness and mental healththat coincides with the

(24:24):
widespread closure ofpsychiatric hospitals in the
latter part of the 20th centuryor deinstitutionalisation, so
when psychiatric hospitalsstarted to close, as Dolly and I
also went on to write aboutthis topic, you see wide
processes of rethinkingpsychiatric care.

(24:44):
You see much more communitywork around remembering
hospitals and I see RoslynBurgess here, so thinking about
Callan Park.
There have been other projectslike that in other parts of
Australia and something very oddhappened there where often very
well-meaning retired medicalpersonnel or people, when
institutions were closing down,grabbed things from those

(25:07):
institutions medical objects,everyday medical objects, record
books, patient records, allsorts of things and took them
home and often they're veryimportant and if you can connect
with those collections you canend up using them.
But I think it sort of sayssomething about people's holding
on to the life of theinstitution in the present.

(25:27):
I talk about this as a sort ofafterlife of the institution.
So that in itself is anotherstrand of historical thinking
about these stories and how wemight bring them in to the wider
narrative.
As you can probably hear, I'mvery interested in what it is in
our present that determines howhistory of mental illness

(25:49):
should be written or could bewritten.
How do we make sense of it?
What names do we give it.
What are the remainders ofmental illness and mental
breakdown in public life?
So I want to turn now to what Isee when I look across the
field, and there are threethemes that allow us to bring

(26:09):
madness in from the margins ofAustralian history, as Jamie and
I argued in our special issueof History Australia, which
Effie mentioned.
Oh, I should say I've got acouple of images here from
museum exhibitions.
This is quite a confrontingimage.
It's an exhibition that Icurated for the Brownless

(26:33):
Medical Library at theUniversity of Melbourne just as
I finished my PhD and then Ileft Australia and went to New
Zealand.
So it was quite an importantmoment for me and that was
that's a wrist cuff and a lockedjacket.
So the publicity that camealongside that went with that
exhibition was very, in someways very problematic, because a

(26:54):
lot of journalists reallywanted to sensationalise the
storytelling around thisexhibition.
But there are some incredibleartifacts that the Melbourne
Museum had.
One of my favorite things ofall time is an exhibition about
Goodner Hospital in Queensland,and this was at the Museum of
Brisbane.
There was a wonderful dayorganized for people to speak

(27:15):
and I was invited to that.
I remember it well because mydaughter was only a few months
old in 2007, no, maybe 2008,somewhere around there and so we
had a wonderful trip and themuseum exhibition itself
incorporated beautiful artworksby people with lived experience
of mental illness and anotherbook I haven't mentioned and of

(27:38):
course I can't mention everyonethere's so many wonderful people
is a strand of labour historythat I think is important in
this field, and this is LeanneMonk, who was a contemporary of
mine as I studied writing aboutattendance and care and work in
institutions.
But back to the three themesthat I think we could consider
as we look at history now.

(27:59):
First of all, I think we couldand should consider psychiatric
institutions as socialinstitutions.
There's a convergence here ofmedical and social history.
I think we should reconsiderour social historical inquiry
and think about the way theselarge institutions in the 19th

(28:20):
and 20th century, before theirclosure, were also social
institutions.
They had links to welfareinstitutions.
They provided respite care.
They bleed in and out of thesocial world around them, and it
would help us to really thinkabout this in our national
history.
These are not marginal concerns.
They're concerns that affectlarge numbers of the population.

(28:41):
There were also medicalinstitutions, as David Roth has
shown in his PhD work aboutCallan Park, where medical
somatic disorders were treated.
Diseases were treated or, atleast, if not treated, noticed.
Diseases were treated or, atleast, if not treated, noticed.

(29:02):
I think if we elevate theseinstitutions as being part of
the mainstream of Australiansocial life, we might kind of
make a shift in how we thinkabout this topic.
For example, the Bringing themHome report, which really talks
about very large-scaleinstitutionalisation of
Indigenous peoples, reallybrought that issue out for
Australian history.
Thinking over time, studies ofout-of-home care, for example,

(29:23):
and adoption also fulfil thatpurpose, and we could also think
about the large sets of datathat these institutions have
contributed to research overtime.
The second theme I want tomention is permeable walls,
mobility and movement betweensocial institutions, people who
moved in and out of institutions.
This was going on for a verylong time.

(29:44):
My newest project with Effiehere is about mental health
aftercare and this is aphotograph taken by Dr Robin
Dunlop, who's assisting us inresearch, and we've just started
the the tentative steps towardslooking at their archival
material with their agreementand permission, here in Sydney,
and we're at the start of thatjourney to look at how people

(30:05):
accessed aftercare.
So worlds outside theinstitution, people who came and
went from institutions.
And finally, stories of livedexperience and consumers.
Or touching on another projectI've been involved with at the
University of Sydney with HansPolz and a wonderful group of
people around consumer networksand advocacy who have come into

(30:37):
our project and participated inour project as lived experience
researchers, as people who arecontributing to the creation of
new knowledge.
It's resulted in excellentthesis work that pushed the
boundaries of what we know andhow we might consider that
positionality that I startedwith at the beginning of my talk
.
How is it that we canincorporate the understandings
of what it's like to live withmental illness as part of our

(30:57):
history writing?
And it's also resulting in avery large collection of oral
history interviews with allkinds of people.
So that's quite exciting.
So these three themes, I thinkmight help us think about how to
connect again the social andcultural to the medical and
bring into focus some of theways in which we might see and

(31:19):
understand questions like theIndigenous experience of mental
illness and among other groupsthat maybe have been overlooked.
And there is scholarship indifferent pockets in Australia
that I haven't touched on here.
I think what would be mostimportant would be to understand
Indigenous or First Nationsways of knowing about mental

(31:39):
illness from culturalperspectives.
So transcultural historicalwork and finally, there are
biomedical aspects of this topicthat I haven't touched on and
there has been work in Australiaby Anne Westmore, here on John
Cade, who was responsible fordiscovering lithium, and I think

(32:02):
if we combined some of thesequestions with social histories
that I've been outlining, wewould have very powerful work
indeed.
I will leave it there.
Thank you very much for yourpatience and for listening.
Thank you, applause.

Dr Effie Karageorgos (32:21):
Thank you very much for your patience and
for listening.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, C cathy.
That was such a fascinatingoverview of the movements in
histories of mental health overmany decades, so I'm going to
move on to our next speaker, Ddr James Dunk, who is a research
fellow in the School of Socialand Political Sciences at the

(32:42):
University of Sydney, where heleads the planetary mental
health theme in the ARCDiscovery Project, planetary
Health History's DevelopingConcepts.
A historian andinterdisciplinary researcher,
his research for teaching andwriting explores how concepts of
self and community are changingin the face of planetary crises

(33:03):
.
He is co-director of theEcological Emotions Research Lab
at the University of Sydney andconvenes a community of
practice on community-basedapproaches to climate distress.
His book Bedland at Bodney Baya study of madness and mental
health in early colonialAustralia won the New South
Wales Premier's AustralianHistory Prize in 2020, and his

(33:25):
research has been published inthe New England Journal of
Medicine, sustainability, Hhistory of Psychology, A
australian Psychologist and Rethhistory.
Thanks so much, J jamie.

Dr James Dunk (33:45):
Thanks so much, E effie, for that very warm
introduction and Cathy for thatwonderful overview.
I just wanted to start byadding my own acknowledgement,
as we begin, that this is ascatical land and always will be
An afternoon in late autumn.
As we begin, people arrive inones and twos at a room in one

(34:08):
of the elegant new UTS buildings.
We rearrange the room into acircle of chairs and take seats
chatting until three or fourminutes after the schedule
starts, when an older womansuggests that we begin she's
travelled an hour and a half tobe there.
We begin, I explain what we'rehere for and my friend asks
everyone to agree to a set ofground rules that we come with

(34:30):
openness and curiosity.
That we're not going to try andfix things or offer solutions.
That we listen carefully andnot interrupt each other.
That we respect each person'sunique experience and not rush
towards comparisons, analogiesor morals.
That we share as much or aslittle as we feel comfortable,
allowing space and time forothers.

(34:50):
Silence is welcome, becausesometimes we need time to
process and reflect.
And, finally, that this is nota therapy session.
We're here to share and listen,to hear and learn, not to
unload.
We're all responsible for eachother for this hour and a half
and for ourselves.
We then introduce ourselves andsay what has brought us here.

(35:13):
This is a climate cafe run by agroup called Psychology for a
Safe Climate, that which existsto contribute psychological
understanding and support withinthe community, helping people
face the difficult realityaround us.
They do this by creating spacewhere difficult feelings and
emotions can be shared.
These can be extremely hard totalk about.

(35:34):
It's quite tricky to slip intoa complex and escalating
planetary crisis in amongst thesmall talk.
Sometimes it's even harder toraise it seriously with friends
and family members, because thatwould mean being honest with
ourselves and with others abouthow the world is changing and
what we fear will happen in themonths and years to come.
That afternoon, a law academicwith tears in her eyes

(35:58):
apologises for not saying verymuch about herself.
She says she's surprised tofind herself so overwhelmed.
After the introductions.
We simply go deeper.
We ask if anyone wants to sharewhat has been happening for
them.
As they've listened, a retiredscientist talks about his
generations generations offorward steps and back steps,
about his own wide range ofpersonal emotions that he's been

(36:20):
through Despair, frustration,anger, guilt.
He mentions his spiritualpractice that has helped him
maintain his sense of self.
A public servant discusses herfrustration at bureaucracy and
inaction, and later on she'llburst into tears.
The woman who wanted to starton time speaks about her efforts

(36:40):
to save birds and trees in herarea, how really staying in a
place, caring for it as best shecan, is her form of activism or
contribution.
A young software programmer isthere mostly just to hear, and
he remains silent.
An Iranian PhD student isdistressed by how her field of
research doesn't seem to betaking.
The programmer is there mostlyjust to hear, and he remains
silent.
An Iranian PhD student isdistressed by how her field of
research doesn't seem to betaking the climate crisis

(37:02):
anywhere nearly seriously enough.
A young activist who lives inthe northern rivers holds back
tears as she talks about thelasting effects of devastating
floods again and again, aboutthe dissonance of going about
her life, about burnout.
The others, who were strangersa moment ago, show her genuine
warmth and care and afterwardsthe law academic asks if I can

(37:24):
pass on a message of support.
A man who's worked in financefor decades and now is moving
into climate finance has beenshocked and appalled by his deep
dive into the science.
He stays quiet for most of ourtime but then speaks
passionately towards the endabout how valuable he's found
the time, how people really needto come to terms with what's
happening around and inside them.

(37:45):
I've been facilitating similargatherings throughout this year.
This one was for Climate ActionWeek last month.
These are quite strikinggatherings where strangers
usually give voice to feelings,sometimes for the first time,
protected by the agreements ofthe start.
People are honest withthemselves and others.
They can say that they'redevastated or furious or

(38:08):
paralysed or in despair.
They can talk about howdifficult it is to pretend that
everything is fine, how hard itis to know whether to bring a
child into the world, how hardit can be to look their
grandchildren in the eyes.
They can talk about theirdisgust, their horror, their
guilt and shame, their agony atseeing burning ancient forests

(38:30):
or screaming koalas, and theirquieter feelings.
And their quieter feelingsNumbness, confusion, wistfulness
, emptiness.
They can also share their hope,their determination, even
moments of happiness and peace,which they grasp and hold on to.
But no one makes them do that.
No one rushes to end on apositive note or say that

(38:56):
everything will work out fine inthe end.
But there's something abouttruthfulness and openness that's
somehow healing.
People feel heard.
Even though despair and griefcannot and probably should not
be magicked away, people alwaysseem to leave with lighter
burdens, they find that they'renot alone.
As you can tell, I'm giving myanswer to this question in a

(39:16):
roundabout way.
As you can see, in the firstversion of this talk that I
wrote, I tried to give ahistorical view of what mental
health is now, pointing to thequite radical contingency of our
models and theories oftherapies, how the self is a
metaphor and one which is oftendisputed by people across time
and place and discipline andschool, and especially across

(39:39):
the therapist-clientrelationship.
That's a valuable subject, but,as you see, I've decided to
focus on what is mental healthnow, at this moment?
What is mental health in a timeof planetary crisis?
What is mental health whenwe're shooting for two degrees
or two and a half degrees ofglobal heating, when the forests
are burning and the cities arechoking?
What is mental health in themidst of a massive extinction

(40:01):
event In the age of loneliness,the Aramissing?
There's, by now, very robustscientific literature linking
climate change and mental illhealth.
There are very obvious ways inwhich increasing heat,

(40:24):
escalating disasters and theresulting disruptions political,
economic, social are alreadyproducing a range of
psychological effects.
There's also an increasingliterature about climate
distress and anxiety, about awhole range of ecological
emotions, these ones that Imentioned in that climate cafe
story.
It's quite a vigorous debateabout using this language of
mental health and illness totalk about the personal impacts
of climate change, about theseemotions, which can be

(40:45):
debilitating and paralyzing andisolating in similar ways to
psychological conditions.
The mental health languagetends to be pathologizing and
individualistic, though, whenwhat we're really talking about
is happening to us all, eventhough it registers quite
differently, or it can registerdifferently in each person.
From steadfast deniers ofclimate change to burned out

(41:07):
activists and to parents andprofessionals and others with
their heads down, carefullyavoiding reports and media,
climate change is affecting allof us one way or another.
What I'm suggesting is thatwe're beginning to see mental
health quite differently now inthis light.
Many of these emotions point todeeper connections with the
world around us.
We're not simply scared aboutwhat's happening to us or will

(41:31):
happen to our children, butwe're grieving the violence and
destruction of the ways thatwe've been living.
We're feeling our way towardsreal bonds across species and a
new, deep, practical reverencefor life.
The fact that these are notmarginal experiences and
feelings, as more and moreresearch shows, but very common

(41:52):
and widely distributed acrossage, but very common and widely
distributed across age, acrosscultural difference, across
country, across class.
This also suggests new ways ofpromoting health and preventing
illness.
This includes things likepeer-to-peer programs, community
health and development,articulating common purposes at
the community and broader levels, and working together instead

(42:16):
of against each other.
There's much talk in this spaceabout resilience.
You might have noticedIndividuals and communities who
can bear the challenges that areon their way or already here.
Part of this is aboutinfrastructure building better
kinds of infrastructure but it'salso emotional resilience
building and sustaining personaland community wellbeing that
can help us out and carry usthrough.
But it's also emotionalresilience building and
sustaining personal andcommunity well-being that can

(42:37):
help us out and carry us through.
Faced with these needs, ourapproaches to mental health are
changing.
Some of this is pragmatism.
Researchers have tried, butthey can't really see a
plausible path to providingindividual or even group therapy
for the steeply rising numberof people who are experiencing
climate-related ill health,particularly when these

(42:58):
resources are going to bestretched by all the other
demands in the crisis energy,shelter, food security,
relocation, that sort of thing,and continuing environmental
disasters that we're alreadybeginning to reel from.
So you may be wondering how dowe deal with all this
historically.

(43:20):
Why am I talking about this?
Instead of talking about thisin abstract terms, let me answer
by giving sort of a briefsketch of my current book
project, my next project andthen a few of the activities I'm
involved in which might give abit of a sketch.
So, as been mentioned, I'm aresearch fellow on a project
exploring planetary health,which is a new idea or program

(43:41):
about a decade old that tries toreframe human health around the
health or integrity of Earthsystems.
There's little in the way ofhuman health on a sick planet,
as they say.
This is already, I think, agood thing for historians to be
getting into and engaging in.
It mixes health history,environmental history,
indigenous studies, publichealth.

(44:02):
We're asking where this ideahas come from, what it draws on.
It's a very contemporaryhistorical project about a
recent and a quite importanteffort to address the crisis.
But with my background in mentalhealth history, my contribution
is to focus on planetary mentalhealth, something that's still
emerging.
So this means climate changeand mental health, the

(44:25):
psychological effects ofdisplacement and climate
conflict and so on, but alsothose eco-emotions I mentioned
earlier.
It's a history of work that'scoming to terms with the mental
and emotional impacts of livingin crisis.
As a historian, I'm choosing toframe the project around how
psychology has been changingunder the weight of crisis for

(44:46):
the last 50, 70 years, somewherearound there from the mid-20th
century.
Working from the premise thatour mental health infrastructure
what we do around mental healthnecessarily draws on a
psychological framework, thereare assumptions involved about
what is the psyche, what is themind, how does it function or
misfunction, and how can we helppeople who are suffering from

(45:07):
mental ill health or prevent ithappening?
The project starts with thefirst real surge of concern that
the planet was in crisis, fromglobal resource shortages, total
warfare, the prospect of atomicannihilation, through to ozone
depletion and populationproblems and food production,
soil desertification,deforestation, climate change,

(45:30):
biodiversity collapse towardsthe end of the century and
indeed, a whole set of planetaryboundaries that need to be
stayed within or else terriblethings happen.
I focus on those who argued fromquite early on that these
environmental problems wereactually human problems.
They weren't just happening inour vicinity.
They were products of ourindustries and they were shaped

(45:52):
by our culture.
There were fundamentalquestions here about human
values and ambitions andanxieties and increasingly, with
the news of planetary crisiscoming in about how humans were
not able to respond effectivelyand why that was.
The next section of the bookfocuses on those who argued,
perhaps a littlecounterintuitively, that the

(46:13):
underlying problem was theanti-human nature of the world,
of the modern world ofindustrialism.
Lewis Mumford, an Americanhistorian and polymath, argued
that these external crisespointed to the social and
political, social and personaldisintegration that had been
going on actually for some time,and that radical renewal was

(46:33):
needed, framed around the humanperson, the self.
He wrote a lot about values andneeds and human fulfilment.
The humanistic psychologiesemerged in the 1950s, partly
filling these gaps.
They developed language thatwas still incredibly popular,
like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, as you might have come across,
the kind of higher needs of thehuman self after it had reached

(46:57):
its basic needs.
One way of reading his work isthat humans needed more than
modern 20th century societieswere providing them.
Existentialist psychology alsosought to incorporate alienation
and anxiety and other aspectsof modern experience into a more
positive view of human growthand development.
Not focusing on the neurosesand the psychoses of sort of the

(47:21):
Freudian approach, Therapistsacted in the spiritual vacuum
left after decades of death anddestruction, locating validation
and meaning in the individualself, which left them at once
quite alone, but also searchingfor real connection and kind of
integrity, authenticity.
The development of Gestalttherapy at the same time these

(47:44):
are all in the 50s can be seenas an attempt to reframe, sort
of the frame of reference, torelocate the frame of reference
in the midst of an emergingcrisis.
These therapies were linkedwith the paradigm-shaking
energies of the countercultureof the 60s, which was linked in
turn with the buddingenvironmentalist movement.

(48:05):
He was a good deal of opennessand willingness to countenance
other ways to reimagine the self, the mind and psyche to
conceive and experiment withquite new visions of how to live
.
But the human potentialmovement and the New Age
movement drew much of theseenergies into an often quite
indulgent sort ofinward-lookingness, and there

(48:27):
was a cultural and politicalbacklash as well to these
unsettling energies that hadbeen unleashed.
Many of the most creative andcourageous projects fell under
the weight of their ownambitions and naivety and
contradictions, and also fromthe violence and effectiveness
of the opposition.
It was not so easy torevolutionise selves and
societies or to reconfigurehuman ecology and geopolitics in

(48:50):
ways that might have headed offthe worst of what's happened
since.
In 1978, another free-welinghistorian, Theodore Rojak,
argued that the same thing wascrushing both the person and the
planet the enormous, unthinkingscale of human activity,
enterprise, production,consumption.
Psychologists were increasinglyprominent in the anti-nuclear

(49:14):
movement, which was developingan environmental awareness,
particularly around thepossibility of a nuclear winter
that would freeze and killalmost everything in the world.
As the Cold War thawed andended in the late 80s into the
90s, many who'd taken up thenuclear threat as a problem in
psychology turned to globalenvironmental problems.
There was a sort of emergingplanetary psychology.

(49:37):
People had learned to take thewhole planet into view and
shifted now from the nuclearproblem to environmental
problems, which were of adifferent nature but similarly
planetary.
They sometimes called what theywere doing survival psychology
psychology that was applied toproblems that threatened the
very continuity of the humanspecies.
As they saw it, Conservationpsychology was a similar sort of

(49:58):
project coming out of theconservation science movement.
How could psychology help toagain protect the human world
via protecting the world itself?
And some of these peopleconnected with these projects
developed a field calledeco-psychology in the 1990s,

(50:19):
merging the problems andtechniques of psychology and
psychotherapy with the ethicsand approaches of deep ecology.
Eco-psychology tried to listento the voice of the earth.
It saw human selves and mindsas embedded in ecological
reality, deeply connected withlife.
They saw pattern and mindeverywhere, and our own mental

(50:39):
health and well-being, they said, was inextricably linked with
the more than human life aroundus and to earth itself, which
was understood, as in mostindigenous cultures, as a living
being.
The final chapter of the book isabout the development of
climate psychology, in whichpsychologists and psychiatrists
Gestalt therapists, Jungiantherapists, eco-psychologists

(51:00):
and many others the broad churchjoin in a loose coalition to
finally take the climate crisisseriously in relation to mental
health and psychology.
They've tackled denialism.
They've turned to behaviouralapproaches.
How can we encourage behaviour,human behaviour, to actually
promote carbon reduction andenvironmentally friendly

(51:20):
solutions and things like that?
But that is, as we can imagine,tied a bit to the problematic
idea that the global climatecrisis can be restored and fixed
by individual action.
And here's really the crux ofclimate psychology.
We're affected by an unfoldingcrisis of planetary proportions
and great complexity.
It's reshaping our worlds andthere's really not that much we

(51:41):
can immediately do that will bemeasurably useful.
And I guess all of this iscoming to say that this is the
context of mental health.
Now, this is what climatepsychology is trying to address
by helping with these difficultemotions and feelings, helping
people adjust to climate reality, to ecological reality, doing

(52:04):
sort of psychoeducation toprovide names for things that
people are experiencing, to helpconnect people with each other,
to help with isolation, toprocess ecological grief and
anxiety and anger.
And then there are the moreradical parts of climate
psychology that also pointtowards the deep cultural change
that's needed.

(52:26):
Psychology is drawn into thiscall for transformation, for a
great and deep transition tobetter and more just and more
plausible relationships betweenpersons and societies and
species.
This involves sometimes quitedeep critiques of conventional
models of the self and thepsyche and of how best to help
individuals and communities.
Rather than locatingpsychological issues in infancy

(52:49):
or helping individualsexperiencing ill health
conditions to return to optimalfunctions in systems that are
killing the planet.
How can psychology actuallyhelp, we ask?
How can mental health actuallybe improved at the same time as
the health of ecosystems andearth systems?
So these are the core problemsof climate.
Psychology and really thisemerging planetary mental health

(53:11):
.
And history has an importantrole, as I hope I've been able
to gesture towards, in showingthe depth and breadth of
traditions in and aroundpsychology and mental health
that are here to be drawn upon,In showing what movements have
arisen and subsided, showing thereactions and how that's played
out.
It can reflect critically onabsences and omissions,

(53:34):
including the sometimestokenistic or extractive use
discussion of indigenousknowledges.
It can help situate the currentand very pressing sense of
personal planetocrasis in theother stories that we tell
ourselves, which will benecessary as we search for new
stories about who we are and howto care for each other and

(53:54):
others in generations to come.
So that's my project that I'mworking on.
That's a little bit about oneway that history can tackle the
world that we're in.
I just wanted to mentionbriefly a few small projects
I've been involved in and thenwe can move to a time of
discussion.
It actually links with the, thereminding project that Kathy

(54:17):
mentioned at the end of her talk.
The person in common between usis Professor Paul Rhodes at
Sydney University.
He and I have started the EcoEmotions Research Lab.
We won a fellowship tobasically work with young people
to understand why cliniciansweren't dealing very well with
climate distress in the therapykind of room in the clinic, and

(54:38):
that has led to a bunch ofthings quite exciting things for
me that I could probably skipover a little of, but to say
that I'm now find myself in theposition of co-supervising
students in psychology and inpublic health, people who are
working on the implications ofclimate-related childlessness,

(54:59):
people who are working on themental health dimensions of
regenerative agriculture andfarming, people who are working
on family therapy in a time ofplanetary crisis, and a really
interesting person who's lookingat experiences and languages of
solastalgia across the Pacificand Asia region.
I don't know if you know thatword.

(55:20):
It's a new word that's beingcoined to name the experience of
being homesick at home.
So the impacts of witnessingthe destruction of a place
that's dear to you developed inrelation to the Hunter Valley
just north.
In relation to the HunterValley just north.
Helping guide and shape thosestudies that are well outside
history in many ways has beenquite revealing and really

(55:42):
enjoyable.
I've helped them, I hope, tosee the value of historical
approaches to the world,including to see where the
concepts that they're using havecome from, how the past is
present, even in the context ofa rapidly oncoming future.
And then we also convene acommunity practice.
You can see that on the right,which is a group of people who

(56:02):
are all engaged in sort ofcommunity-based responses to
this stuff, People who say weneed to move beyond the clinic,
we need to work on promotion, oncommunity building, we need to
give language and literacyaround how we're experiencing
and how we're going to movethrough these things together.
And I've been volunteering withPsychology for a Safe Climate,

(56:23):
doing the sort of work that Imentioned at the start, but also
doing some research with themand working on a white paper.
I think that's probably enoughfrom me.
So thank you for your attentionand I look forward to the
questions.
Thank you.

Dr Effie Karageorgos (56:49):
I just have a couple more things to say
.
Sorry, I'm not going to let youall go yet, so I'm not going to
let you all go yet, so I'm notgoing to thank myself, but I do
want to thanks Jesse.
I'd like to thank Jesseactually, yeah, jesse Adam Stein
of UTS, who is our vicepresident, the History Council

(57:14):
of New South Wales and theHistory Now Program Director,
who's put together such afantastic program this year.
Also the History Council of NewSouth Wales team, C catherine
Shirley, who is here, A amandaWells and Laura Sayle, as well
as the History Council ExecutiveCommittee, S stephen Gapps, J
julie McIntyre, and I'm notgoing to thank myself.
Thanks also to the StateLibrary of New South Wales event

(57:39):
team, in particular LydiaTasker, C callum McLean and
Rachel Franks.
And thank you to everyone at theAustralian Centre for Public
History at UTS.
And more broadly, we want toacknowledge the History Council
of New South Wales, would liketo acknowledge its cultural
partners you can see them listedhere, including our major

(57:59):
funder, the New South WalesGovernment, via Create New South
Wales.
And just to say very quickly,thank you for being a wonderful
audience and we have our nexttwo sessions are.
The next one is Truth Tellingand Histories of Genocide and we
have.
Our next two sessions are thenext one is Truth-telling and
Histories of Genocide, which isan online-only session on 31

(58:21):
July, and then on 7 August,transnational Design Histories.
So I hope to see you all back.
Thank you so much, thankseverybody, you so much you.