Museums of Madness ????

1. Museums of Madness ???? • I’m gonna’ talk about History Culture and Power in mental health • from western european perspective, • I’m no expert - draw on Michel Foucault, Andrew T Scull and John Read • demonstrate similarities between struggle on prisons and struggle around insanity Lock Them UP

2. Middle Ages + Renaissance • Madness linked to death and murder • Expelled from cities and left wander • Christian charity parishes Lock Them UP

3. 1650 – 1800: The Great Confinement • time economic uncertainty across western europe – high unemployment, low wages, poverty, etc. Uprisings against monarchy • Shift in attitude and need for social control • Hopital General, Paris = 1656 – not just mad people, but the homeless, poor, sex workers, robbers, old and sick Lock Them UP

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7. 1650 – 1800: The Great Confinement • Idleness being reason to round people up, working became a treatment – along with chains, bleedings, purging • Over time, differentiation of populations to prisons, psychiatric asylums and workhouses or poorhouses • Madness becomes object of science towards end 18th century Lock Them UP

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12. 1800’s: Moral Treatment and Reform • Parliamentary committees uncovered significant abuses of those in mad houses • Mad house proprietors and the medical profession advocated institutions • 1800’s saw the birth of a reform movement – Pinel (unchained the insane) and Tuke (moral treatment - no lash required) Lock Them UP

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15. 1800s: Reform Triumphs • The reformers won – asylums for all, not just the rich! Nice asylums with external visitors • Battle for medical control of the asylum • Madness becomes mental illness, only treatable by doctors • Startling increase in size and number of asylums and population of inmates 1844 = rate of 10 per 100,000 and 1890 = 26 p/100k; 1827 = 9 asylums, 116 ppl avg and 1890 = 66 asylums 802 ppl avg. Lock Them UP

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18. The Invention of Schizophrenia • 20th century medicine • Emil Kraepelin and Eugen Bleuler – “grandfathers” of modern psychiatry • Research supported by Rockefeller Foundation Lock Them UP

19. John Read + history of madness • Social control in the interests of the powerful • Invasive, damaging and/or violent “treatments” or “rehabilitation” • Experts generate theories that camouflage what is actually happening Lock Them UP

20. Punishment or Treatment: Wot’s the Diff? • Foucault suggests an insoluble conflict between two models in our judiciary system: between whether to judge wrong-doing in accordance with the law, or to diagnose abnormality within the framework of a medical model. • This in part explains why its so easy to have prisons overflowing with people who might otherwise be deferred to treatment: And why we need question if treatment is better than punishment – indeed if there is any difference? Lock Them UP

21. POWER Read the Nine Lives Story punishment masquerading as treatment POWER = not a thing but a relation (you don’t hold it) Power is dynamic, fluid and circulates – not one source Power is productive + constructive, repressive + controlling Whenever power is exercised there is resistance We are never powerless, and we are never given power, we take it, we exert power, we exercise it Lock Them UP