2023-2025 Policing Mental Disorder in London and Amsterdam since 1945, Universiteit van Amsterdam
In the UK in 2018, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services declared that ‘too many aspects of the broader mental health system are broken; the police are left to pick up the pieces.’ In the Netherlands, too, policing has struggled to meet changing needs and circumstances. We do not know how this all happened culturally, nor how this heritage can be unpicked to enable new thinking and policy; there has never been a comprehensive historical investigation of policing and ‘mental disorder’, a term traditionally embracing mental illness and learning disabilities—this project is the first.
Beginning in 1945, the research will transform the histories of psychiatry, mental health and learning disabilities, breaking them away from institutional and clinical contexts and towards everyday life in streets and homes. The two city case studies of London and Amsterdam will reveal these face-to-face encounters. Archival and newspaper sources will provide insights around how age, gender, race, class and experience produced local outcomes. Ascertaining these outcomes facilitates the comparative study of the two cities, and will show how culture and police involvement shaped modern mental healthcare in two nations. This is an urban history of medicine with significant potential to understand how cultural heritage in migrant and LGBTQ+ communities shapes contemporary attitudes, praxis, and openness to seek help.
Research Questions
- How and why have the police come to have a major role in mental healthcare, what they have done with their position historically, and have the practices of the different nations and cities been distinct?
- What did face-to-face encounters between the police and people with mental disorder look like— how has identity and intersectionality played out on the streets of two capital cities and how have they been understood by police authorities, specific communities and the wider public?
- What can the genealogies of policing ‘mental disorder’ tell us about the contemporary attitudes amongst certain groups towards accessing mental health services?
2022-2023 The History of Causes of Mental Distress, Wellcome Trust RFQ Commission
Over the past 100 years, there have been a huge number of theories about what causes mental ill-health; Wellcome’s Mental Health Team wanted to know more about them in order to inform their work and vision. Dr Sarah Marks (project lead, Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health), Dr Sarah Chaney (Queen Mary University of London) and I were commissioned to explore some of the key ideas in mental health science today through a historical lens. Why, we asked, might it be important to situate genome studies in the long history of eugenics and heredity studies? When was discrimination first considered a factor in approaching mental health and illness? And how has the idea of trauma changed over time?
We collaborated with a number of organisations, including Mad Zine Research, Mental Fight Club, and the Youth Advisory Group at the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Mental Health. As a result, we completed a report on survivor / service user understandings of mental ill health, articles for peer-reviewed journals, and – along with artist Sasha Bergstrom-Katz – a digital timeline of ideas about causation, which can be found via this link.
2021-2022 History of Sexuality Project, University of Birmingham
Research to ascertain what happened at the University of Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s in relation to attempts by staff to effect sexual reorientation. The research revealed ‘aversion therapy’ was used by psychologists and psychiatrists to instill what they considered ‘regular heterosexual behaviour’, often on men who had sex with men, in a way that would now be considered a form of ‘conversion therapy’. The official report was published in June 2022. The report resulted in an institutional apology and is altering policy at the University, which has gained global press attention, such as the reports via these embedded links here, here and here.
2016-2021 “Forged by Fire’: Burns Injury and Identity in Britain, c.1800-2000’, AHRC Funded
Project that explored the role of burn injuries in developing and changing identities in Britain since 1800. Centring on three city case studies (Glasgow, Birmingham and London), this research considered how being burned or scalded impacted on individuals, communities and countries. As well as being responsible for Scottish research and that on ambulance, war, and psychological issues, I led on the exhibition and the accompanying public activity programme. First mounted physically at The Museum of the Order of St John, London, the online version of the exhibition, with new material, is available here. You can read more about the project on our blog.
2015-2016 ‘Quakers & the First World War: Lives & Legacies’, AHRC Funded
Working with volunteers, we co-produced four themed booklets (viewable via these embedded links): the Friends’ Ambulance Unit; Friends’ War Victims’ Relief Committee; Quakers on the Home Front; and Conscientious Objection and Conscription. We held at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery what, as far as we are aware, was the only prominent UK event to commemorate the centenary of conscription. We ran study days and supported skills-based development for volunteers. The booklets were sent to the 500+ Quaker Meeting Houses in the UK and prominent overseas sites linked with Friends, including Swarthmore and Earlham Colleges.
2015 ‘Women Doctors and the First World War’, Worcestershire World War 100
This research set out to discover more about the first woman doctor at Worcester Royal Infirmary, who was appointed during the First World War. The findings instead opened up the experience of Martha Jane Moody-Stewart and her fellow medical women in Ireland, England, Serbia and South Africa. The results were published in a booklet, viewable via the embedded link, and featured in a touring exhibition with The Infirmary and George Marshall Medical Museums.
2013-2015 ‘Quakers & the First World War: Faith & Action’, Central England Quakers
My research into the Friends’ Ambulance Unit began in preparation for the major six-month exhibition in 2015 at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. It was of central importance to Quakers in Britain and helped ensure that alternative voices were heard during the Centenary of the First World War. Reviews made clear its importance to Quakers and the public stories of the Centenary: it was deemed ‘outstanding’ (p.31) and ‘acclaimed for the high standard of its presentation … It deserves to be seen by as wide an audience as possible’ (Calon: Newsletter of the Meeting of Friends in Wales, 20, 2016, p.6). Indeed, so inspired were Quakers in Wales by the exhibition that the Welsh Centre for International Affairs and the Welsh Government board, Cymru’n Cofio Wales Remembers 1914-18, were involved in recreating the Birmingham exhibition’s success for the 2017 National Eisteddfod and nationwide tour.