Heather Murray, "Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
Aug 13, 2024
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Heather Murray, a cultural and intellectual historian, discusses her book on the experiences of psychiatric patients in 20th-century America. She challenges common perceptions of patients as passive, revealing their active engagement with societal and personal issues. Topics include the impact of deinstitutionalization on mental health narratives, the philosophical implications of resignation, and how modernity shaped psychiatric institutions. Murray also reflects on post-war shifts in psychiatric understanding and its influence on identity and individualism.
The podcast emphasizes the transformative journey of psychiatric patients from perceived resignation to active observers of their identities and communities.
It highlights the ongoing dialogue about the balance between individual rights and community needs in the context of mental health care.
Deep dives
Historical Perspectives on Psychiatry
The discussion elaborates on the cultural and intellectual history of mental illnesses in the 20th-century United States, focusing on the evolution of perceptions surrounding psychiatric patients. It highlights the shift from a 19th-century sensibility of passive resignation to a more active approach seeking possibilities within the psychiatric space. Key examples include the transformation of the understanding of patient behavior, such as the notion of 'institutionalitis,' which emerged post-World War II, reflecting societal concerns about emotional numbness and the implications of such states. This historical context allows for a deeper exploration of how psychiatric identities were shaped by institutional experiences, and how these experiences influenced broader societal views on mental health.
Resignation and Emotion in Psychiatric Care
The concept of resignation as a philosophical stance emerges prominently in the early to mid-20th-century psychiatric discourse. Intellectuals observed resignation in patients as a potential harm or a dignified acceptance of their situations, with contrasting interpretations depending on the societal climate. Personal correspondences from patients highlight moments of emotional expression mixed with ordinary details, underscoring a nuanced human experience within psychiatric confinement. This juxtaposition invites a reevaluation of the implications of resignation, moving beyond judgment to understanding it as an emotional state that can include elements of wisdom and struggle.
Individualism and Community in Mental Health
Discussions on individualism became increasingly relevant, particularly in the post-war era when societal fears of conformity and totalitarianism emerged. The promise of possessive individualism, particularly within the context of psycho surgeries, offered patients a chance to reclaim their pre-illness identities, linking personal agency with scientific advancements. Alongside these transformations, debates surrounding community needs versus individual rights intensified, particularly during the civil rights movements and the development of the Patient Bill of Rights in the 1970s. These evolving discussions illustrate the complex interplay between individual identity and communal responsibility in mental health care.
Continuities and Changes in Mental Health Discourse
Contemporary attitudes toward mental health reveal lingering complexities regarding deinstitutionalization and the desire for spaces of care and community. Despite advancements in understanding mental illness, unresolved feelings about the past often shape current dialogues, revealing a deep yearning for understanding and connection. Moreover, emerging perspectives on pairing talk therapy with medical treatments suggest a modern synthesis of approaches, emphasizing the importance of emotional connections with medications. This evolving landscape indicates ongoing conversations about human nature, mental health, and the quest for compassionate care, drawing from historical frameworks while seeking new solutions.
Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) by Dr. Heather Murray is a cultural and intellectual history of people with mental illnesses in the twentieth-century United States. While acknowledging the fraught, and often violent, histories of American psychiatric hospitals, Heather Murray also suggests that it is in these hospitals that patients became more intense observers: they gave more conscious consideration to institutional and broader kinds of citizenship, to the nature and needs of communities versus those of individuals, to scientific modernity, and to human rights and solidarities among the suffering. All of these ideas have animated twentieth-century America, and, as Dr. Murray shows, have not just flowed into psychiatric hospitals but outward from them as well. These themes are especially clear within patients' intimate, creative, and political correspondence, writings, and drawings, as well as in hospital publications and films.
This way of thinking and imagining contrasts with more common images of the patient—as passive, resigned, and absented from the world in the cloistered setting of the hospital—that have animated psychiatry over the course of the twentieth century. Asylum Ways of Seeing traces how it is that patient resignation went from being interpreted as wisdom in the early twentieth century, to being understood as a capitulation in scientific and political sources by mid-century, to being seen as a profound violation of selfhood and individual rights by the century's end. In so doing, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
