Yes, I am ill. But you know dozens, hundreds of madmen are walking about in freedom
because your ignorance is incapable of distinguishing them from the sane. Why am I
and these
poor wretches to be shut up here like scapegoats for all the rest? You, your assistant,
the
superintendent, and all your hospital rabble, are immeasurably inferior to every one
of us
morally; why then are we shut up and you not?
- Anton Chekhov, ‘Ward No. 6’ (1892)
This past year marked the thirtieth anniversary of Roy Porter’s seminal 1985 article,
‘The
Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below’.
1
Few works in the history of medicine have received so enthusiastic a
reception. Porter’s call to reclaim the voice of the voiceless has had an extraordinary
echo,
becoming not only a necessary reference but also a classic trope. This is especially
the case
among historians of psychiatry. In a field where patient narratives have long formed
their own
subgenre, shedding light on these hitherto unheard stories taps into popular fantasies
probed
by Porter himself – images of gothic madhouses and their gloomy inhabitants; whispers
and
cries; dark corridors encased in windowless walls, their interiors mirroring the mind
gone
astray.
2
So ubiquitous is this imagined
space that some have recently proposed to create an independent research area dedicated
to
‘Mad Studies’.
3
Fetishised, mythicised,
ostracised, the psychiatric patient has emerged as an unlikely protagonist, capturing
the
scholarly, cultural and artistic imagination alike.
Yet recent assessments suggest that Porter’s call has not fully been heard. The history
of
the patient remains ‘curiously underwritten’ in several areas, some have claimed.
4
Others have maintained that, on a conceptual
level, ‘the history of the patient’s view is as undeveloped now as it was back in
the
mid-1980s.’
5
Porter’s exhortation, for the
most cynical, has acted as little more than a seductive proposal to lure audiences
without
bringing anything new to the understanding of medical processes or patient experience.
6
In view of historians of psychiatry’s special
love affair with the world of their protagonists, a critical review of these recent
developments seems all the more pertinent.
This special edition explores the varied ways in which patients’ voices have guided
psychiatry’s construction, deconstruction and reconstruction from 1800 to the present.
In this
respect, the thirtieth anniversary of Porter’s seminal article acts as an opportune
occasion
to re-examine the field using fresh historical and historiographical perspectives.
7
In what ways have historians of psychiatry
taken on the project of a history ‘from below’? How have they turned such tales into
objects
of study? What do their works reveal? And how has this focus on patient narratives
shaped our
understanding of the processes by which mental illness is understood and treated in
the
twenty-first century?
These are timely issues. Over the past few years alone, a number of major changes
in mental
health care legislation throughout Europe and North America, and also China and other
non-western countries, have significantly affected the experience, management and
representations of mental illness. The recent revision in 2013 of the ‘psychiatric
bible’ –
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) – was
described by the previous director of the US National Institute of Mental Health as
nothing
less than an ‘absolute scientific nightmare’.
8
In Europe and the United States, criticism of ‘deinstitutionalisation’
has become widespread, with many arguing that the turn to community care has created
more
problems than it has solved.
9
Groups of
patients and so-called ‘Mad activists’ have been increasingly vocal and effective
in promoting
their cause, inspiring the formation of a new independent field amidst controversial
political
reforms.
10
In other spheres, a flurry of
successful international exhibitions points to the growing public appeal of patient
creations,
11
just like the popularity of
first-person accounts signals a vivid interest towards ‘madness narratives’
12
in the cultural psyche.
13
The academic community, for its part, has sought to integrate
various new complementary actors to fill the voids in standard histories of psychiatry.
14
These developments are taking place against
the backdrop of ever-vulnerable institutional foundations. Amidst these formidable
tensions,
questions abound.
What can historians of psychiatry gain from adopting a performative view of the patient’s
role? Conversely, what can members of the psychiatric community learn from ‘listening
to
insanity’?
15
These issues are thorny
indeed. Three decades on, historians remain divided between two broad historiographical
currents. On the one hand, the success of Porter’s proposal has brought a new scholarly
focus
on testimonies left by those deemed mentally ill. On the other hand, however, the
still
ubiquitous Foucauldian legacy has led many to consider those patients who managed
to voice
their opinions as exceptional rarities.
16
The contributors to this special edition take issue with this latter idea. Inspired
by recent
research, they highlight the fact that it is actually possible to write a history
of
collective ‘mad’ cultures. Of these cultures still little is known. Their role in
the
formation of medical discourses needs to be investigated. We submit, then, that writing
‘from
below’ not only casts new light on psychiatry’s past; it is in fact necessary for
a
comprehensive picture of the field’s ongoing history. Thirty years on, the time has
come to
ask new questions and revisit these tales afresh.
1.
The Patient’s Turn
Framed as a critique of the aims, methods and objects of the history of medicine as
it had
hitherto been practised, Porter’s programmatic 1985 essay called for a radical shift
in
perspective. The history of medicine ought to be written not only by and about physicians,
but also by a new generation of professional historians who would ask different questions.
Health and healing ought to be studied not only through the prism of scientific progress,
but also as veritable cultural systems. Illness ought to be understood not only as
a
biological event, but also as a resolutely social phenomenon involving its own practices
and
rituals. The focus ought to be not only on cure but also on
care; not only on doctors’ achievements but also on the whole range of
patient experience.
Porter, then, encouraged the medical historian to turn to new narratives. His was
a new
model – indeed the model of the ‘future’
17
– that placed the sufferer at centre stage. To be sure, he was not the first to put
forth
these ideas.
18
Yet he was perhaps the one
to most explicitly articulate them. He also did it in such a way as to resonate with
the
spirit of his times. By the mid-1980s, a number of widespread and vocal challenges
to the
medical authority had permeated popular and academic circles alike.
19
In the academic community, Porter’s essay joined the
chorus of the newly refashioned social history, effectively placing patients in the
category
of other traditionally under-represented groups. Noteworthy in this respect is his
indebtedness to British historian Edward Palmer ‘E. P.’ Thompson. In his 1963 book
The Making of the English Working-Class – which had ‘opened [Porter’s]
eyes to how history could be written’
20
–
Thompson famously challenged classical Marxist accounts of workers’ history by offering
a
new vision of subjectivity. Neither powerless nor fully dominated by external forces,
his
subjects were active participants in the cultural negotiations of their identities.
21
To an extent, Porter thus merely shifted
Thompson’s vision of a ‘history from below’
22
to the medical world. The very socio-political context within which
he was operating was also profoundly changing the treatment, management and representation
of the sufferer. Published in 1980s Britain, Porter’s patient-centric call to arms
in many
ways echoed broader institutional reforms intended to strengthen the patient’s role.
This specific context helps explain why Porter’s views resonated so strongly in the
psychiatric field. Coloured by heated discussions over issues of patient rights and
mounting
ebullition about psychiatric mistreatment, the post-1960s mental health sector became
the
theatre of great outcries amidst a flurry of rapid and radical changes:
deinstitutionalisation, pharmacological revolution, growing emphasis on standardised
diagnostic tools, increasing distrust of psychoanalytical models, and so on. Researchers
from the social sciences and humanities played an important part in these developments.
Erving Goffman’s sociological depiction of asylums as ‘total institutions’, Phyllis
Chesler’s articulation of the profoundly gendered nature of mental health practices,
Gregory
Bateson’s radically novel ‘double bind’ conceptualisation of schizophrenia, Frantz
Fanon’s
sociological study of the dehumanising processes of colonial domination – all contributed
to
this growing re-examination of psychiatry’s aims and methods. Willingly or not, many
of
these figures became associated with a burgeoning movement of ‘critical psychiatry’.
23
Among historians, Michel Foucault rapidly emerged as this movement’s designated champion.
The publication in 1961 of Folie et déraison
24
initiated a wide-ranging reappraisal of
the field’s traditional narrative. Foucault put into question a ‘Whiggish’ history
of
medical progress, capturing the cultural imagination with a decidedly new picture.
Psychiatry’s mythical birth represented for him neither progress nor a radical rupture
with
the past. It merely reproduced and in fact deepened structures of exclusion under
medical
disguise. The Foucauldian patient – subjugated, submissive, docile, powerless – became
a
symbol of medicalisation gone wrong.
Nowhere was the silencing of oppressed voices depicted more vigorously than in the
Foucauldian universe. The asylum, in particular, stood as the ultimate symbol of medicine’s
woes. And just as the language of the insane had been absent from history, it similarly
had
no place in modern discourse:
Everyone dreams of writing a history of the mad, of going over to the other side and
tracing the great evasions of the subtle retreats into delirium from the beginning.
Yet,
under the pretext of tuning in and letting the mad themselves speak, one already accepts
the division between the two as a fact. It’s necessarily better to put oneself at
the
point where the machinery that makes these qualifications and disqualifications is
actually operative, and putting the mad and the non-mad on two sides facing each
other.
25
Elsewhere, Foucault made his point even more forcefully: patient autobiographies simply
could not be used to write the history of madness. These texts, however ‘enthralling’,
belonged to a different ‘discursive universe’. They were ‘irreparably’ out of history.
26
Foucault thus displayed profound
ambivalence in his interpretation of psychiatry’s past. On the one hand, he criticised
deeply ingrained myths and insisted that the medicalisation of insanity had but sharpened
the divide between the sane and the insane. On the other hand, he effectively replicated
this divide by rejecting the possibility of including the lunatics’ voices in historical
accounts.
27
Even when he did publish the
memoirs of the ‘deranged’ parricide of Pierre Rivière in 1973, Foucault again insisted
on
the impossibility of incorporating the actor’s viewpoint. Rivière’s narrative was
to remain
‘untouched’, unexamined, for it would be meaningless – indeed disrespectful – to try
to
‘superimpose’ any kind of historical analysis on his experience.
28
To quote Carlo Ginzburg, in the process of revealing
history’s purported ‘archaeology of silence’, Foucault himself confined the mad to
a
‘genuine silence’.
29
It was with this polarised view of the doctor–patient dynamics that Porter took issue:
We should stop seeing the doctor as the agent of primary care …What we habitually
call
primary care is in fact secondary care, once the sufferer has become a patient, has
entered the medical arena. And even under medical control, patients have by no means
been so passive as the various ‘medicalization’ theories of Foucault and Illich might
lead us to believe.
30
While agreeing with Foucault’s overall analyses about the processes of segregation
that
accompanied the birth of the hospital, Porter emphasised the sufferers’ sense of agency.
Manufactured through the ever-tyrannical ‘clinical gaze’, the Foucauldian patient
embodied
victimising structures of ‘biopower’, knowledge, discourse and control. He was in
many ways
a ‘by-product of medicine’.
31
Against this
pessimistic view – and indeed against its simplistic re-appropriations – Porter adopted
a
more optimistic vision of patients’ potential for empowerment.
32
In its Anglo-American incarnation, the anti-psychiatry movement offered alternative
critical avenues. On one side, there was the call for a ‘return to the patient’ along
with
an increased focus placed on subjective experience and its (many) stories.
33
On the other side, there was strong
criticism of the psychiatric institutions and theoretical presuppositions that sustained
them.
34
In presenting ‘a view of lay
initiative, resilience, and capacity to play the system’, these alternative accounts
offered
for Porter ‘a salutary counterbalance’ to the Foucauldian model.
35
Theirs was a path to a new narrative, clothed in the
language of protest.
It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that when Porter set out to apply his own research
programme he turned to the very historical protagonists whom Foucault had portrayed
as
characteristically voiceless: the mad. In 1987, two years after his seminal article,
he
published
Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane. In this pioneering work
Porter articulated a specific idea of his vision. He situated his approach between
two
positions that he found problematic. The first was the practice of retroactive diagnoses.
Rather than ‘read[ing] between the lines’ or ‘search[ing] out hidden meanings’, his
aim was
‘simply and quite literally’ to see ‘what mad people meant to say’.
36
But in so doing, Porter’s goal was not to turn his actors
into historical heroes or martyrs manicheanly placed against the purported villainy
of
physicians. Rather, he aimed at showing the “‘dialectic of consciousness” between
the mad
and their times’. In sum, his was an attempt to write ‘a history, not just of psychiatry,
but of madness itself’; for ‘[i]nsanity is not just an individual atom, a biological
accident, but forms an element in the history of sub-cultures in their own right’.
37
2.
Three Decades of Psychiatry ‘From Below’
Porter opened up new paths. In the past thirty years many scholars have followed his
footsteps by turning to a wealth of new patient-focused sources: journals, correspondences,
asylum notes and autobiographies. Anthologies of first-person accounts and case studies,
in
particular, have witnessed a remarkable explosion.
38
This is notably the case for women’s narratives.
39
The female patient’s voice, argued the
second-wave feminists, had largely been edited (if not altogether written over) by
psychiatry’s (male) authors. Here the fin-de-siècle hysteric emerged as an emblem
of
protest, heroically playing out in her symptoms the ills of past times. At once feared
and
desired, she came to be interwoven in contemporary fancy with that other, mythical
figure –
the Madwoman.
40
Another significant development has been the expansion of this programme to new
sociocultural settings. Initially bearing the imprint of Porter’s scholarship at the
UK-based Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, the historical study of
psychiatry ‘from below’ spread beyond Britain. Gradually, patient stories arose from
such
diverse environments as Japan as well as colonial and post-colonial cultures.
41
In an attempt to highlight the
multi-dimensionality of asylum life, some scholars have similarly moved beyond the
strict
patient–doctor dyad to include previously neglected actors who have played a significant
role on the psychiatric stage.
42
Porter’s plea also found a niche among broader audiences. In recent years, a burgeoning
group of activists and scholars who combine anti-psychiatric with psychiatric survivor
approaches have emerged as vocal champions of patient voices. This group includes
various
social critics, revolutionary theorists, historians and radical professionals who
challenge
medical paradigms of mental illness and often look to history as a guiding force.
Wielding
the rhetoric of defiance and liberation, this self-proclaimed ‘alternative community’
has
organised into a distinct field known as Mad Studies. In this context, madness is
no longer
reviled – either as a label or as an Otherising concept:
By Mad, we are referring to a term reclaimed by those who have been
pathologized/psychiatrised as ‘mentally ill’, and a way of taking back language that
has
been used to oppress …We are referring to a movement, an identity, a stance, an act
of
resistance, a theoretical approach, and a burgeoning field of study.
43
Ever the elusive term, madness is employed here ‘to celebrate a plurality of
resistances and subversive acts against sanism.’
44
Characteristic in this respect is the mission statement of the
Icarus Project, a network of so-called Mad activists created at the dawn of the twenty-first
century by a group of individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The network’s very
name
is symbolic – an ode to the young Icarus who, according to Greek mythology, perished
by
flying too close to the sun with the wings of wax and feathers that his father Daedalus
built for him to escape persecution by Cretan King Minos. The identification is made
explicit:
Defining ourselves outside convention, we see our condition as a dangerous gift to
be
cultivated and taken care of rather than as a disease or disorder needing to be ‘cured’
or ‘eliminated’. With this double-edged blessing we have the ability to fly to places
of
great vision and creativity, but like the mythical boy Icarus, we also have the
potential to fly dangerously close to the sun into realms of delusion and psychosis
and
crash in a blaze of fire and confusion.
Proud, defiant, impervious to medical and societal orthodoxy, here is a community
whose
members navigate the fine line between hubris and humility, recognising their identity
as
humans rather than gods and knowing all too well that ‘the most incredible gift can
also be
the most dangerous’.
45
But this is not just about identity. Deeply concerned about psychiatry’s current lack
of
resources, Mad activists and scholars wish to subvert the current state of mental
health
services. As such, they acknowledge that ‘to take up “madness” is an expressly political
act’.
46
Whether centred on marginalised
and minority ethnic communities (eg., the Survivor Research collective),
47
specific national contexts (eg., the Chinese Network for
Users and Survivors of Psychiatry),
48
or
artistic performances (eg., the ongoing ‘Mad Love’ project),
49
their goal is to transform the community from below. To this
effect, the collective activities they organise are aimed at directly influencing
the
psychiatric discipline in the hope of emulating past accomplishments – witness the
removal
of homosexuality from the DSM in the 1970s.
50
3.
Porter and Foucault, the Impossible Compromise
With these considerations in mind, it is interesting to reflect on the selective
appropriation of theoretical models undertaken by these various groups of scholars
and
activists alike. Foucault’s concept of the social construction of mental illness,
blended
with the rhetoric of oppression and resistance, is frequently conflated in their accounts
with Porter’s views on the primacy of patient experience. Yet it will be remembered
that by
pointing to a bona fide ‘sub-culture’ of psychiatric patients, Porter
directly contradicted Foucault (who some ten years prior had characterised the idea
of
historians ‘letting [patients] speak for themselves’ as nothing less than a ‘dream’).
51
This phenomenon is actually characteristic
of current scholarship on the history of psychiatry. Indeed, the dissonance between
the
Foucauldian and Porterian models has deeply influenced the reception of the latter’s
work
over the past three decades. This has taken unique forms in various national contexts.
In
France, for example – where, as Jan Goldstein has noted, every statement about the
history
of psychiatry must still be accompanied by a ‘pro-’ or ‘anti-’ Foucault stance –
52
it is only very recently that historians
have begun to openly champion Porter’s ideas.
53
(Intellectuals who dare oppose or even qualify Foucauldian views may
indeed be accused of ‘fascism’, as illustrated by the latest controversy between
philosophers Didier Eribon and Marcel Gauchet.
54
)
There is another element that helps explain why it has been particularly delicate
to argue
in favour of a patient-focused history in Foucault’s country. In France, perhaps more
than
anywhere else, the association between psychiatry and the abuses of power became a
dominant
trope after it was discovered at the Liberation that half of the psychiatric patients
had
starved to death during the war. This was not the Nazis’ doing. In that country, then,
the
asylum came to be perceived less as a ‘total’ than a ‘totalitarian’ institution –
one in
which doctors did not merely silence their patients but also effectively let them
die.
55
This tragedy has profoundly coloured French
post-war critical psychiatry discourses. Such a context has made the idea of several
independent ‘mad voices’ throughout history difficult to conceive.
56
In contrast, Britain’s history of patient advocacy
associations since the mid-nineteenth century rendered more credible Porter’s notion
of a
history of psychiatry ‘from below’.
57
This
– coupled with the aforementioned specificities of Anglo-American anti-psychiatric
discourses – not only helps understand Foucault’s and Porter’s drastically different
views
on patient agency; it also brings new light on the different receptions of their work
in the
French- and English-speaking worlds. When Porter’s ideas became popular in the mid-1980s,
the Foucauldian corpus was being newly circulated in Anglo-American academic circles.
Unlike
in France, it was also rapidly criticised.
58
The weight of local cultural contexts must therefore be taken into
account when reflecting upon the diverse interpretations of Porter’s call to do history
‘from below’.
In any case, the resulting academic stance has often been one of compromise between
the
field’s two patron saints. Historians emphasise the importance of turning to the stories
of
the insane, following in the footsteps of Porter. Meanwhile, by embracing a more Foucauldian
approach, they highlight the historical rarity of such stories. Consequently, many
have
postulated that those actors who did manage to write or speak were exceptional anomalies
(save for a few icons such as Daniel Paul Schreber, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Antonin
Artaud). Quite logically, then, historians of psychiatry have tended to answer Porter’s
plea
by exploring the lives of those extraordinary ‘rebels’ through detailed case studies
or
anthologies of their writings.
59
Despite
its interest, this tendency is not without its limitations.
4.
Critical Reflections
What to make of all this body of work? In 2007, Swiss historian Flurin Condrau offered
a
rather provocative answer to this question. He acknowledged that, although Porter’s
exhortation to write medical history from the patient’s perspective was an attractive
suggestion, his call had not fully been heard. After Porter, researchers have allegedly
been
lured by the ‘charm of the sources’, proceeding to collect one autobiography after
another
without any actual ‘methodological innovation’.
60
Thus Condrau’s pessimistic assessment:
Unlike other areas of research, such as the history of medical sciences or the history
of disease, not much further methodological reflection has taken place and this has
left
the history of patients intellectually less stimulating than other research fields.
61
According to Condrau, the history of patients mostly gave birth to disparate collections
of
individual cases. These myriad personal stories, although unique and at times interesting,
are all enclosed in their singularity. Historians ‘from below’ have reportedly learnt
little, if anything,of those global forces that govern history, nor of the evolution
of
those discursive, institutional, or social processes that shape representations of
illness
and broader healthcare systems.
The authors of this introduction do not share Condrau’s pessimism. We do, however,
believe
that the time has come to undertake a critical evaluation of what it is precisely
that
historians do (and can do) with these various ‘madness narratives’. To be
sure, a number of the aforementioned remarks are justified with regard to the history
of
psychiatry. Some scholars do seem to assume that the patient’s voice is always de
facto interesting, by paying little or no attention to methodological
implications. In many cases, Porter’s article effectively serves as an all-encompassing
reference, as if quoting his plea for a history ‘from below’ validates all originality.
And
the charm of the source certainly contributes to this phenomenon. In other words,
calling
for history from below and actually accomplishing it in any systematic and constructive
fashion are different enterprises.
As seen above, Porter himself insisted on the fact that historians should not only
focus on
individual stories but also study the ‘dialectic of consciousness’ between the subjects
and
their times. He did not elaborate as to how his successors should go about this. Neither
did
the content of his Social History of Madness indicate any concrete
methodological paths. Instead, it consisted in a thematic presentation of diaries
and
autobiographies written by famous institutionalised individuals: Vaslav Nijinsky,
Robert
Schumann, etc. Porter emphasised that he was not ‘advocating a “great madman”
approach’.
62
He also implied that his
book was but a tentative attempt at opening a new field of research. Nevertheless,
he left
his readers on a rather frustrating note, giving no real clue as to how one could
go about
studying more ‘ordinary’ patients or relating individual subjective experiences to
the
formation of a broader ‘sub-culture’. Porter’s call, then, was more an exhortation
than a
description of his own practice.
63
In recent years, researchers from various fields have brought fresh intellectual and
methodological perspectives to this discussion by turning to different corpi. Some
have
analysed the experiences of more ordinary patients, notably through medical files
64
and asylum newspapers.
65
Others have adopted complementary approaches, such as
literary criticism, to tackle new questions. In a recent book on the nineteenth-century
poet
Paulin Gagne, for example, literary scholar Pierre Popovic explored his protagonist’s
experience in all its socio-poetic entanglements. Sharing Condrau’s belief that analyses
of
patient voices are often unduly ‘romanticised’, Popovic begins by dismissing fashionable
categories such as folie littéraire (‘literary madness’). These, for him,
are but ‘aporetic illusions’ that prevent scholars from ‘truly understanding and reading
marginal works’.
66
But Popovic goes
further, exploring Gagne’s written productions through an in-depth so-called socio-critical
analysis. In the process, he revisits the historical case study. Challenging previous
descriptions of Gagne’s writings as perfect examples of (a-historical) ‘literary madness’,
Popovic reveals that far from being acontextual, Gagne’s inner world bears a close
intertextual relationship with the social, political and intellectual cultures of
his time.
The ambitious theoretical model proposed by Popovic highlights the importance of a
shared
‘social imagination’ (imaginaire social) in shaping individual
subjectivity. Similarly, Laure Murat’s recent book, The Man Who Thought He Was
Napoleon, casts light on the complex ways in which patients’ apparently
incoherent ideations are decidedly inscribed in history.
67
By reflecting in their symptoms the evolution of political
torments, her actors show that various social and political events have each produced
a
special kind of folly. The above suggests that there lurks, even in the most extravagant
of
voices, historical material that ought to be analysed and conceptually reflected upon.
68
But the reverse is also true. If patients’ productions are never actually ‘raw,’
69
if they are always embedded within a
specific sociocultural setting, the very settings in which they evolve also bear marks
of
their actions. The Foucauldian idea that madmen have always been ‘outside of history’
is
just one side of the story. In fact, we could even argue that patients have never
talked
more than after having been reduced to silence. By creating asylums and large-scale
inmate
populations, psychiatric modernity has also rendered this population more visible.
It has
created a collective identity. A comprehensive longue durée history
therefore remains to be written on the emergence of a patient ‘counter-voice’.
70
Whether looking at John Perceval’s Alleged
Lunatics’ Friend Society (1845) or Louisa Lowe’s Lunacy Law Reform Association (1883),
the
early ‘anti-alienist’ or anti-psychiatric movements in France and Germany, these patient
groups – their periods’ own Mad activists – existed well before the 1960s. Some (eg.,
those
of Louisa Lowe in the UK, Elizabeth Packard in the US and, later, Clifford Beers in
the US)
have even had an important impact on shaping mental health policies.
71
The psychiatric discourse, as well as the broader social
and political world, has thus at times been considerably influenced by voices ‘from
below’.
In sum, we would go beyond Porter by claiming that there is not only a ‘sub-culture’
of
psychiatric patients, but a veritable culture in the full sense of the word – indeed
a
plurality of cultures with their own topoi, figures and references; cultures that
have
circulated within and beyond asylum walls; cultures that have not only influenced
the
various psychiatric discourses but also popular, cultural and political thought. Put
differently, the patient’s voice should not be a mere tangential addendum to psychiatry’s
history. It should, on the contrary, be interactively included with other madness
discourses. Without this, the project of a history ‘from below’ ceases to be performative
and is reduced – as its critics have claimed – to a compilation of individual cases.
The
time, then, has come to write new scripts. We ought to take into consideration the
large
variety of psychiatry’s main protagonists. We ought to renew our sources beyond the
textual
to include different modes of expression. We ought to extend chronological and geographical
boundaries. We ought to realise that patient-centred narratives answer different aims
and
take several forms. We ought to understand how madwomen and madmen have mattered in
the past
to better understand how their perspective can also be relevant in the present.
5.
Tales from the Asylum
This special issue aims at providing a fresh and novel look into psychiatry’s past
and
present tales. From ‘outsider art’ to clinical diaries, from popular accounts to
autobiographical novels and from heated manifestos to asylum scribbles – patients
have cried
out their ills in a variety of forms. These real and imagined stories of mental illness
help
throw light on the complex ways in which psychiatry has been construed, explained
and
fictionalised since its inception. How have individual subjects influenced the construction
of clinical categories? How have patients (and indeed their loved ones) come to play
a
decisive role in effecting medical and extra-medical changes? In what ways have patients
chosen to voice their experience? How have their demands been met by the legal system?
And
how have various methods of treatment been accepted or rejected by those actors in
differing
social, cultural and political settings? By focusing on psychiatry’s ever-fluid identity,
this volume investigates the varied ways in which the patients’ voices have guided
this
discipline over the past two centuries.
The five contributions below deal with the above topics from resolutely inter-disciplinary
perspectives. Themes include non-western patient accounts, the impact of class and
gender on
formulations of mental illness, the juxtaposition of views ‘from above’ and ‘from
below’,
the influence of the anti-psychiatry debate, unedited correspondences between patients
and
physicians, challenges to traditional theoretical approaches, the boundaries between
fact
and fiction, the influence of changing socio-political contexts on experiences of
madness,
the role of patients in altering diagnostic classifications and curative methods,
alternative accounts and the fluctuating nature of the psychiatric patient over time.
Written by a new generation of scholars, these articles bring fresh perspectives to
the
history of psychiatry ‘from below’ by opening new paths and moving away from pessimistic
views of patient agency.
Harry Yi-Jui Wu’s piece centres on the development of bei
jingshenbing, a set of new phenomena that emerged in Chinese media and popular
culture during the past few years. This neologistic expression refers to someone who
has
been misidentified as exhibiting symptoms of mental illness and admitted to a mental
hospital. By charting the rapidly changing role of bei jingshenbing
individuals ranging from protesters against psychiatry to structured self-advocacy
groups,
this paper reveals an important facet of the Chinese people’s recent experiences with
psychiatric modernity. It also underlines the complex nature of patient agency against
a
rapidly shifting social, cultural, political and medical landscape. Perhaps most
importantly, Wu shows that these various voices should not be considered subaltern
narratives. Instead, the actors of bei jingshenbing have played an
important part in transforming mental health policies and lay opinions about psychiatry.
Their activities should thus be read not as tangential accounts but as powerful
contributions to a new cultural phenomenon. Through archival research and ethnographic
fieldwork, Wu offers a timely treatment of emerging developments that have important
implications for China’s mental healthcare system and society.
But under-explored contexts are not merely geographical, as suggests Benoît
Majerus in his paper. If Porter’s call resulted in a fetishisation of the
archive, it also created an historical narrative shaped by the presence and availability
of
sources. This has given rise to a disproportionate focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. By analysing the unedited patient records of Brussel’s Institut de Psychiatrie
after the introduction of neuroleptics and antidepressants in the 1950s, Majerus provides
a
novel glimpse into patients’ own experiences of the so-called chemical revolution.
Such
investigations ‘from below’ are rare when it comes to the historical study of drugs,
the
author reminds us. This is largely due to the dominance of such fields as Science
and
Technology Studies in which the focus tends to be less on human subjects than on their
chemical counterparts (eg., drug trajectories).
72
However, it is also due to the influence of canonical texts and
their emphasis on psychiatry’s mythical origins. The Foucauldian ‘medical gaze’ is
here
given a post-war twist through the articulation of a decidedly more complex story
illustrating patients’ sense of agency. So too is Porter’s agenda. For although the
‘medical
encounters’ he evoked in his programmatic essay occurred among a multiplicity of actors,
historians have only begun to incorporate these additional characters beyond the traditional
patient–doctor dyad.
73
By studying the
transcriptions left in patients’ letters alongside physicians’ records and nurses’
notes,
Majerus shows the intricacy of hospital dynamics in post World War II settings. Drugs
did
not necessarily contribute to silencing patients’ voices. Eschewing those accounts
because
of the advent of new purportedly ‘silencing’ therapeutic technologies thus offers
an
incomplete picture of psychiatry’s past.
Also highlighted in this volume is the multidimensionality of asylum life. By centring
on
two patients at Bethlem Hospital who actively participated in the formulation of
contemporary medical discourse, Sarah Chaney leads us to reconsider a story
that we thought thoroughly exhausted. Chaney shows that, rather than being merely
passive,
patients sometimes had input into the way madness was represented and understood.
In this
respect, the British notion of ‘voluntary boarding’ – usually associated with the
1930
Mental Treatment Act – offers an important (if under-studied) angle for interpreting
these
Victorian tales. One of the two patients examined here was a boarder; the other, a
‘certified lunatic’. Chaney analyses the impact of this distinction on asylum experiences
and on therapeutic relations. Both of her protagonists seemingly accepted certain
elements
of the patient role while rejecting others. Both also, however, took on additional
identities and even contributed to medical debates over the ways in which madness
could be
defined and represented. There is no such thing as a single history of asylums, the
author
reminds us; just like there is no such thing as a single history of patients. Chaney’s
account brings up a number of fundamental issues central to the history of psychiatry:
the
value of individual case studies, the notion of a ‘typical asylum patient’ and, indeed,
the
active (and sometimes fruitful) collaborations among patients and their various
caregivers.
74
Burkhart Brückner’s paper provides a vivid illustration of what Porter
called the ‘Brechtian survival strategies’ deployed by those deemed mentally ill.
75
His subject is Friedrich Krauss, a
travelling salesman from Southern Germany who in 1852 published a 1000-page account
accusing
a Flemish family of trying to assassinate him. Convinced that he had been the victim
of
‘mesmerist forces’ since 1816, Krauss kept records of his consultation with several
prominent physicians of the time in wide-ranging enquiries into any possible (orthodox
or
unorthodox) ‘cure’ for his symptoms. But Krauss is an unlikely patient, for he never
perceived himself as mentally ill. His story would be interpreted as schizophrenia
only upon
the rediscovery of his manuscript in 1967. That tome makes for unusually rich historical
reading. It also brings to mind that other nineteenth-century narrator of paranoia
– Daniel
Paul Schreber, whose Memoirs of my Mental Illness was made famous by Freud
at the dawn of the twentieth century. Yet Krauss’s case remains largely unknown. Brückner’s
historical and historiographical analysis offers original insights into the selective
appropriation of medical knowledge by a layman of that time. The author shows a Krauss
in
constant negotiation with each physician he consulted; a Krauss who strove to be fully
heard
without surrendering his sense of dignity. Such a case highlights how the interaction
of
discourse ‘from above’ with that ‘from below’ should not be construed in terms of
a strict
dichotomy. Rather, the individual is embedded within a cultural network that shapes
conceptions of self, illness and identity.
Capturing these polyphonic interactions became easier with the introduction of new
recording techniques. By focusing on case notes from Glasgow’s Gartnavel Mental Hospital
in
the 1920s, Hazel Morrison offers ‘a history from below’ of clinical
practices and institutional procedures. This is made possible because Gartnavel’s
superintendent, David Kennedy Henderson, instigated a routine of keeping verbatim
records of
the conversations between patients and practitioners. The resulting materials preserved
the
patient’s voice with a high degree of faithfulness, capturing with remarkable clarity
some
of the anxieties exhibited by patients and psychiatrists as they interacted with one
another. By exposing the complex interplay among Gartnavel’s various actors – which
also
include clinical clerks, medical officers and stenographers – Morrison brings out
the
subtleties behind narrative co-construction. Also highlighted here are the transnational
intellectual networks in the rapidly changing interwar psychiatric scene. As the author
shows, Henderson was highly influenced by the work of Swiss-born American émigré Adolf
Meyer, who championed the use of the patient’s ‘own language’ as the basis for therapeutic
intervention.
76
Unlike Freud, Meyer
taught his students and colleagues to defer from transforming patient stories into
complex,
theory-laden narratives. The unusually rich material provided by the Gartnavel case
notes
thus allows the historian to undertake an in-depth content analysis of those interactions.
Yet it also begs some fundamental questions. How (un)filtered are these notes? How
‘truthfully’ do they capture the patient’s voice? And, indeed, do they perhaps reveal
more
about the medical staff than they do about the patients themselves?
77
This special issue, then, is itself a symptom. Though understood metonymically, the
asylum
in the volume’s title looms large over the aforementioned stories. A symbolic and
protean
space, it has allowed for complex variations of experience. In Bedlam
late-nineteenth-century drawings, the patients depict themselves as birds in a giant
dome
circled by the asylum staff. In a 1962 animated film made by patients at Lausanne’s
Cery
Hospital (Switzerland), the protagonist’s dreams – represented by wooden birds in
a cage –
are taken away from him upon his admission to the clinic. In recent Mad activist rhetoric,
this metaphor of entrapment has given way to individuals taking wing towards freedom…lest
they fly too close to the sun.
78
Historians, of course, have different aims from those of Mad activists. And this is
perhaps
where it becomes most relevant to re-examine such tales. In an era where the ‘astounding
silence of the mad’
79
still reigns, doing
history ‘from below’ may help generate a meaningful dialogue among historians, patients
and
psychiatrists.
80
In the process, it will
bring novel perspectives on the way in which madness has been (and continues to be)
staged,
voiced and managed – debunking old myths and creating new ones in the process.