As Mental Health Awareness Week rolls round again, our Community Engagment Officer, Maria wanted to share a few experiences, reflections and plans from Dorset History Centre.
As you may be aware, DHC cares for the records of Herrison Hospital, formerly the County Asylum. These records have been fully catalogued over the course of the last year, thanks to a full-time Archivist funded by the Wellcome Trust. The collection includes plans, correspondence, accounts, minutes and ephemera as well as patient records.
The records are now easier than ever to search, and the collection is well-used by family historians and academics. The stories are being uncovered of many former Asylums around the country and each has its own variations, but contemporary interest lies in the reassessment of these institutions – their founding, their philosophy, their funding, their definitions of mental illness and the treatments and approaches taken. Since the life of the Asylums runs concurrent with the economic success of the Industrial Revolution, Victorian morality and a growing understanding of the unconscious life this history is dense, controversial and deeply fascinating.
However, at DHC we feel that new understandings of the past also come about through engagement in the present, and we have explored ways to invite people who currently experience poor mental health to work with this, and other, collections. As lock down broke over us, we were working with The Arts Development Company (TADC) to recruit a group of people to work creatively with the collection in partnership with a professional poet and sculptor, and we look forward to returning to this challenge. We have also made several public calls for ex-patients or visitors at Herrison to share their experiences with us.
We are growing our understanding of the difficulties of involvement for people affected by mental illness and their supporters. These include the unpredictability of mood, travel, social anxiety, expense and stigma. We are also slowly building relationships with partners such as TADC, the NHS START Team, local commissioners and others to smooth the way through these challenges and get more people using heritage and the arts to explore their own feelings and connect with others.
Many participants in our ‘Inspired by Archives’ sessions have told us how surprised they have been by our documents, and how much fun and interest they have had in responding to them. We are determined to break down barriers and find ways to bring similar experiences to those affected by mental illness.
If you’d be interested in participating in a group aiming to explore mental health through historic records and arts please let us know, and your details will be confidentially stored until we are able to contact you with details of an event or online activity.