This volume highlights the importance of diverse voices and perspectives in understanding the history and heritage of psychiatry. Exploring the complex interrelations between psychiatry, heritage and power, Narrating the Heritage of Psychiatry complicates the pervasive biomedical narrative of progress in which the history of psychiatry is usually framed. By examining multiple perspectives, including those of users/survivors of mental health services, the collection sheds light on neglected narratives and aims to broaden our understanding of psychiatric history and current practices. In doing so, it also considers the role of art, activism, and community narratives in reimagining and recontextualizing psychiatric heritage. This volume brings into conversation perspectives from practitioners, patients/users and scholars from the humanities and social sciences.

Narrating the Heritage of Psychiatry challenges dominant biomedical models of progress in psychiatry, highlights the importance of diverse voices and counter-narratives in memorialisation efforts, and argues for the need for a variety of perspectives in understanding psychiatric history and heritage.

What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.

Narrating Heritage critically examines the links among heritage, rights and social justice. This book brings important original ethnographic research and unique case studies together in a coherent and cohesive way to examine patterns and differences of approaches to heritage. It exposes discourses of the uses and abuses of heritage, and provides narratives of persistence, demonstrating the importance of heritage in securing human rights and social justice. Drawing on over ten years of research and ethnographic fieldwork based on six complex case studies from Turkey and comparing them with case studies from across the world, the book explores a variety of social, political, cultural and economic heritage discourses, making explicit the relationship between cultural and natural heritage. This book expands on these discourses by examining the role of violence in heritage, expanding on the concepts of both direct and slow violence. It situates heritage discourse within the sphere of human rights and lays out redistribution, recognition and representation as dimensions of social justice in a heritage context. The case studies in this volume explore multiple themes, from the links between cultural performance and the construction of collective identity and sense of belonging, to the roles of education, learning about other cultures and nationalist use of education. They also discuss the relationship between construction of heritage, space, and access and exclusion, as well as the impact of authoritarianism and heavy neoliberal policies on heritage making.

‘Fascinating and compassionate’ Horatio Clare The King of France – thinking he was made of glass – was terrified he might shatter…and he wasn’t alone. After the Emperor met his end at Waterloo, an epidemic of Napoleons piled into France’s asylums. Throughout the nineteenth century, dozens of middle-aged women tried to convince their physicians that they were, in fact, dead. For centuries we’ve dismissed delusions as something for doctors to sort out behind locked doors. But delusions are more than just bizarre quirks – they hold the key to collective anxieties and traumas. In this groundbreaking history, Victoria Shepherd uncovers stories of delusions from medieval times to the present day and implores us to identify reason in apparent madness.

Into the twenty-first century, millions of disabled people and people experiencing mental distress were segregated from the rest of society and confined to residential institutions. Deinstitutionalization – the closure of these sites and integration of former residents into the community – has become increasingly commonplace. But this project is unfinished. Sites of Conscience explores use of the concept of sites of conscience, which involves place-based memory activities such as walking tours, survivor-authored social histories, and performances and artistic works in or generated from sites of systemic suffering and injustice. These activities offer new ways to move forward from the unfinished deinstitutionalization project and its failures. Covering diverse national contexts, this volume proposes that acknowledging the memories and lived experiences of former residents – and keeping histories and social heritage of institutions alive rather than simply closing sites – holds the greatest potential for recognition, accountability, and action.

An extraordinary account of life behind the locked doors of a secure psychiatric ward from a nurse who worked there for seven years. Dennis O'Donnell started work as an orderly in the Intensive Psychiatric Care Unit of a large hospital in Scotland in 2000. In his daily life he encountered fear, violence and despair but also a considerable amount of care and compassion. Recounting the stories of the patients he worked with, and those of his colleagues on the ward, here he examines major mental health conditions, methods of treatment - medication, how religion, sex, wealth, health and drugs can bear influence on mental health, the prevailing attitudes to psychiatric illness, the authorities, the professionals & society. What emerges is a document of humanity and humour, a remarkable memoir that sheds light on a world that still remains largely unknown. 'This is a superb study of people whose minds have gone wrong, and the art of caring for them' Evening Standard