History Talks - HCNSW Podcasts

History Now: Histories of Mental Health

June 21, 2024 • The History Council of NSW and various guests • Season 1 • Episode 4

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Historians Professor Catharine Coleborne and Dr James Dunk discuss the depth of historical writing about mental illness in Australia and reflect on its resonance in the present moment; how can we write the history of mental health now?
Chair:  Dr Effie Karageorgos

This event is held in partnership with the University of Newcastle’s Future of Madness Network.

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Dr Effie Karageorgos:

Hello everyone, good afternoon, welcome. I think we'll make a start now. I'm Effie Karageorgos, so I'm here replacing well, I'm chairing this session, but I'm also I've got two roles tonight. I'm replacing our illustrious program director of History Now, J jesse Adams Stein, who's not here tonight. I'm replacing our illustrious program director of history now, jessie Adam-Stein, who's not here tonight. So first I'll be introducing history now as a series, and then I'll be introducing our speakers and chairing the session on the histories of mental health. Before I start, I'd just like to acknowledge the land upon which we're holding this event, which is the land of the Gadigal people. I want to pay respects to elders, past and present, and I want to acknowledge that these lands have never been ceded. So, before I transform into the chair for this specific event, I want to say a few things about History Now. So I'm reading a script that has been given to me, apologies. History Now is a long-running public history talk series with the aim to bring what you might call cutting-edge historical practice into public discourse. The vibe of the event is candid and conversational, featuring professional and academic historians and history-related experts. History Now has had several iterations, organisers and homes over the years. It's sometimes been run in person and it went online during COVID. Of course, and this year, in 2024, history now is being coordinated by Jesse Adam Stein, Dr Jesse Adam Stein, who is history council of New South Wales vice president and a member of the Australian Centre for Public History. At UTS, we have venue support from the State Library of New South Wales. Thank you, and there's a whole list of other people to thank, which I'll do at the end. In History Now 2024, we have nine sessions. We started in March and the final one is in November, and you can find out about all of those on the website. There's a full event program. It's on the History Council website and the Australian Centre for Public History website. Okay, so I'm now going to transform into the chair for this specific event. Thank you everyone. So I'm Effie Karageorgos. I'm a lecturer in history at the University of Newcastle. I studied the social history of war, specifically focusing on protest histories of psychiatry, protest histories of psychiatry, violence, war trauma, and I was so happy to be asked to chair tonight, today's session, which, of course, is going to be Professor Catherine Colburn and Dr James Dunke speaking to you about the histories of mental health. C Kathy and Jamie are scholars whose work I have long admired and who I'm very lucky to have worked and work alongside in a range of ways. They are certainly two of the more inspired historians of mental health in this country. I'm not sucking up to you both. I actually do believe this.

Dr Effie Karageorgos:

I met them both at the History of Psychiatry Winter School held at the University of Sydney and organised by Professors Hans Polz and Mark McKayley in 2018, when Cathy generously came to speak to our group of HDRs and high degree research students and early career researchers at the Winter School. Cathy and Jamie met in the same year, I believe, through the Australian Historical Association's Copyright Agency Bursary Mentorship Scheme, which led to Jamie working alongside Cathy to create the University of Newcastle Future of Madness Network in 2019., and he also holds an honorary position at the University of Newcastle Castle. Since then, they and myself also have been involved in a range of Future of Madness Network related events, including Pictures of Madness for the History Council of New South Wales History Week in 2019. Actually, that was in 2020, not in 2019, sorry and a forum on admissions, new voices in mental, organised by Jamie in 2022. Cathy and Jamie were responsible for the incredible special issue of History Australia Journal in 2022 entitled Bringing Madness in from the Margins Mental Illness and Historical Change and, incidentally, includes a fantastic article about deinstitutionalisation by Hans Polz and Dr Robin Donlop, which last year was the most downloaded article in History Australia, which is fantastic. It shows the ongoing interest in histories of mental health. I think Cathy and Jamie have also both ably served as presidents of the Australian and New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine, so we see several years of fruitful collaboration and cooperation between tonight's speakers and work that has contributed significantly to the way we see Australian histories of mental health today.

Dr Effie Karageorgos:

So after that CKarraghe-Georges, I'm going to introduce our first speaker, who is Professor Catherine Colbin. So Cathy will speak and then Jamie will speak and then we will open the floor up to questions. Okay, and hopefully you know, start a bit of a discussion. So Professor Colbin is a historian at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales. She's written histories of mental health and institutions, colonial families and health, and museums and museums, collections and exhibitions of psychiatric histories and objects.

Dr Effie Karageorgos:

She is the co-editor with Matthew Smith from Strathclyde University of a successful book series with over 30 titles since 2014, called Mental Health in Historical Perspective. In 2020, she published a short book as part of that series called why Talk About Madness. This book is designed to provide readers with an entry point to the large and sprawling field of the history of mental illness in institutions. With Dr Effie Carragiorgia, she is pursuing a new history of mental health aftercare. With Dr Evie Carragiorgis, she is pursuing a new history of mental health aftercare funded by the Australian Research Council, and together they lead the Future of Madness Research Network. Catherine's most recent book examines the histories of colonial vagrancy and has recently been released Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia Regulating Mobility 1840 to 1910, which was published by Bloomsbury. So I'm going to hand over to Cathy. Thank you, applause.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

Thank you so much, E effie. Oh lovely, aren't you good? Thank you for that really lovely, warm introduction and thank you so much much everybody for being here this evening. I understand it got a little cooler and windier outside after I arrived here at the library, so really appreciate it. And thanks to the history council and our sponsors.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

Um, I too would like to acknowledge the gadigal people on whose lands we are this evening and pay my respects to elders past and present. Uh, I'm delighted to speak alongside Dr James Dunk, known as Jamie, and I hope together we can really get a good conversation going. So where I'd like to start this evening is to reflect on my scholarship in the social history of mental illness or madness over time, especially in relation to Australian social and cultural history. How has madness featured in Australia's past, particularly from its settler, colonial past, and how has my own thinking changed since I began to conduct research in this field? And in reflecting on all of this, I hope to point to some ways in which I think we think, hopefully in conversation, we could be writing this history now, and I know Jamie will push the boundaries a little bit more, both in his wonderful collection of images and also his ideas in his talk. So I see my role as setting up this conversation.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

Just a note on language. You'll notice we use the term madness this is a word that as many of you I'm sure do know, has been reclaimed by the mad studies movement and we use it self-consciously and also the word asylum, which is a word that appears in some of the book titles that I'll be talking about, and there are a couple of images that you know. Depending on your own perspective, you might find a little more confronting. The knowledge I want to share in my talk will include glimpses, but not a full picture, of what the foundational scholarship in the field in Australia has told us. Overall, my narrative suggests that there's been a shift in historical thinking about the space of the institution of the asylum, and here is one from New South Wales Gladesville Hospital, from its earliest beginnings in the landscape of colonial New South Wales through to a much deeper engagement with communities of care and practice emerging in the appreciation of the lived experience of mental illness and mental breakdown. So, moving from that institutional perspective and I think one of the earliest pieces of scholarship on an institution in New South Wales was WD Neill's Asylum at Castle Hill. So Effie mentioned my book why Talk About Madness? And if any of you have looked at this short book, you'll know that I've always been really interested in illness and illness narratives, and so that's my starting point this evening. During my master's research, where I focused on early modern British history, particularly English women and life cycles using medical and other writings, I was really fascinated by how women's illnesses were described in midwives' manual, medical and other writings. I was really fascinated by how women's illnesses were described in midwives' manuals and other writings and, interestingly, I came across some first-person accounts of mental breakdown in the 17th century, and so that really has been an entry point for me personally as a historian. Similar accounts, wherever I could find them, in whatever format, have formed the basis of my reflections on the history of madness. The words of people in the past and my love of archival research always stay with me.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

When I began my PhD at La Trobe University in 1993, I made a decision to focus my attention on Australian history and move from British history rather than continuing in that early modern historical period as a researcher, and I remember making a really personal decision that I wanted to focus on histories of our own place. I also moved universities at that point. At the time I was very influenced by Aboriginal histories and writing and literature about investigating what it meant for white historians to write about Aboriginal history. I had many friends who were researching and writing in those fields and it was also a time and of course, when is it not a time when delineating one's focus for research was highly political and it seemed to me that I didn't have enough experience as an undergraduate coming through in Australian history. I didn't have enough experience in thinking about those particular issues and I think this is an important point about positionality and identity that I might come back to towards the end of my talk. Another point here is that I wasn't trained formally in the history of medicine and it is a really vibrant field and has grown over time with medical education. When I say vibrant, it's been reinvented over time and I think that's important because I've spent most of my career inside that tent one way or another and I've engaged with international colleagues and scholarship, largely defined by the subfield of historical writing of the social history of medicine.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

But what I did have at that time was a strength in feminist and gender history. I'd taken a feminist history course with Pat Grimshaw at the University of Melbourne. In my honours year and by the time I commenced my PhD I was surrounded by a very strong group of women scholars at La Trobe who were all writing feminist history topics for their PhDs. It's quite profound when I think about it now. It was a very strong group of us. So I turned in those early years to gender as my category of analysis to think about illness in the past, my vast British history reading helped me because I'd come across a wonderful book by a scholar called Michael MacDonald who wrote about 17th century physicians describing sorry, a 17th century physician who described mental illness and mental breakdown.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

And I was also because of that British history reading and being steeped in those kinds of well from 17th and 18th century onwards, really I developed a real fascination with institutions and so many scholars were writing histories of institutional life and care in Britain. And at the time scholars were also very preoccupied with Elaine Showalter's proposition of 1985 in the Femalemality that women were more likely to be confined as mad, and she also talked about madness as construed as being aligned with femininity, and this is an idea that was challenged over the years, particularly by New Zealand historians, I have to say, but also others writing about a more complex field of gender in the institution, others writing about a more complex field of gender in the institution. So, as I said, there were many individual asylums that became the subject of history writing in England and Scotland in particular and Roy Porter, who would later become an examiner of my doctorate, had of course written on every single topic in the field of the social history of medicine, including madness, and I'd also read histories of the asylum in France and American scholarship. It was always very appealing and influential for me, and particularly early American scholarship that looked at institutional demographic patterns, institutional cultures and regimes, and I think it was my international reading in the field that became a signature for my work and really helped me see the larger scholarly community, something that's enabled my career, and if anyone here is pursuing a PhD, I think it's really important to steep yourself in international literature. But there was also quite a lot of work in Australia and I also read very deeply and widely. There were early histories of psychiatry and institutions that I've mentioned, read very deeply and widely. There were early histories of psychiatry and institutions that I've mentioned WD, neal on Castle Hill and other similar examples, things that were kind of more popular. I guess for institutional commissioned history writing is something that popped up all the time in my research Administrative histories such as Milton Lewis writing about managing madness, bits and pieces of scholarship about WA, south Australia, tasmania very little on Tasmania, I have to say and Queensland and histories written by psychiatrists reflecting on their life and work. So my understanding of this field grew and grew and started to mushroom the more I engaged with all of this work. It was also shaped by the work of Jill Julius Matthews, who wrote about women at the Glenside Asylum in South Australia in the 20th century, interestingly in her book Good and Mad Women, and Stephen Garton's impressive and important work, which I think has shaped all of our work in this field.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

Medicine and Madness also used gender as a way of thinking about psychiatric, institutional populations and patient demography. So here you can imagine me being a postgraduate student just soaking all of this up. I now had the perfect kind of shaping devices to look at how gender played out in an institutional setting, using sex difference as a way of physically separating populations inside institutional confines. That's how asylums did it, but also gender in discourses of medicine, and madness lent itself to this kind of analysis of how women and men were talked about, treated and understood inside the world of institutions, and I was able then to kind of use that as a way to get inside all the dimensions and dynamics of institutional culture and life. I still feel like I could keep doing that forever. There's so much to say here.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

I was also really interested in trying to get at experience. How do people experience mental breakdown and confinement? But experience was and is a problematic term in historical research and writing. What does it mean to get at experience? How do we fully get inside the past and appreciate what it means to do that or to talk about experience? And of course it's very difficult experience, and of course it's very difficult. So I found my way by reading against the grain, looking for patient resistance and the voices of the confined.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

Another influence then on me was thinking about the idea that we could look at texts and textuality in a post-structuralist account of sources in the archive, really prioritising language rather than narrative. And I became really interested in the archive, really prioritising language rather than narrative. And I became really interested in the idea of case notes as shifting narratives, stories capturing people inside the asylum case books, the result of all of this was my PhD, and it became a book a little bit later on called Reading Madness, which focused on women at the Yarra Bend Asylum in Melbourne in the 19th century but also referred to models of masculinity along the way, and I tried as much as possible to point to women's resistance but also forms of writing and representation of mental breakdown, through first person accounts but also official inquiries. So coming through that process of writing a thesis at that time, which was a significant era for feminist and gender history, meant that I was able to reflect on what gender might add to the history of madness. But I began to see the limitations of gender as the sole category of analysis, because of course there are many, also many other kinds of people confined in institutions the plight, for example, of sole white men on the colonial frontier, men Stephen Garton also wrote about who were living alone and experienced isolation and lack of family support. Chinese men who came for gold digging, excitement and enterprise and ended up isolated and alone and disconnected and perhaps suffering racism and violence. All kinds of people on the colonial frontier and in the colonial world, non-white people, including indigenous peoples, and I'll come to that in a moment. So it followed then that age, physical disability, physical illness, general health were also important aspects of this inquiry.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

Now just a little sidebar note I spent a lot of my career in New Zealand and it was there that I really came to grips with what it might mean to talk about colonised populations through the work of wonderful postgraduate students, particularly Maori populations at Auckland Asylum, and I think at that time I was able then to re-read Australian literature and find more that people had written about the experiences of Aboriginal people in some parts of Australia where they appeared in institutional populations, and at the end of my talk I'll comment on this as a bit of a problematic that we need to revisit. There have also been some very rich biographical accounts, just a handful of individual Aboriginal people who we can find out more about through their collision with institutions, such as Tara Bobby, who was a Goonai man from Gippsland. He spent time at the Kew Asylum but he was also at Coranderrk and Ramayuk and he died in 1874. So he spent his life in lots of European institutions but also played a role with Europeans in other ways as well. So there are some very deep and rich interesting stories. So what did it mean to go mad in the colonial period.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

I moved on to a larger intellectual project to investigate how we think about colonial madness itself and of course this is where Jamie's work comes in. He's worked about on the, the idea of early colonial New South Wales and bedlam and madness, and explored that in in more depth and particularly imaginatively, interrogating colonial madness, and there's not really a very strong chronology in the book covers coming through here, but I'm just kind of gesturing towards these kinds of works as I go. So how did people cope when they fell on hard times, when they experienced mental breakdown and ended up inside institutions? Did they have families advocating for them? If they did, who advocated and why and how? How did they discuss issues with institutional authorities, including medical superintendents or attendant staff, the nursing staff and institutions? What processes were put in place to engage families, particularly at a time when there was a huge fear that colonial populations were very atomised. There was very little in the way of family networks in the colonies.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

So these ideas intersect with welfare history and I turned to my great passion really, which was and is work on families and the way family members intervene in institutional care and assist those who are confined. And I think this whole theme, which really does kind of get connected then to welfare history in Australia, has allowed me to step into spaces of thinking about extra institutional care, community psychiatry and community care. So what I've given you now a little bit focused on my work, I realise, but the ambition I had in doing that was to share with you how I see Australian history unfolding and how I kind of went along with that. We can see the influences in the narrative I've given you of Australian history writing at large, moving from a social control model of the institution that considered questions of gender control, class and criminality in constructs of Australian social history writing in the 1980s and 90s, right through to thinking more about language, the linguistic turn, texts and textuality in the asylum records, through to patient and family agency, multiple communities and interactions, an increasingly highly mobile field of engagement that we can see if we look at the asylum as being part of wider society, so not separate from and hidden away, although 19th century asylums were but actually connected to and part of wider society. There's been another strand of research in Australia that I want to talk about before starting to wind to my conclusions and thoughts about where I think we're headed. Thoughts about where I think we're headed.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

And in 2005, after a productive collaboration, dolly McKinnon and I published this book Madness in Australia, and it was an edited collection, contained a number of chapters, including chapters about Dolly's own wonderful work about soundscapes of the asylum, hearing madness, people writing about built heritage, people writing about 20th century formulations of the history of mental illness and work on museums and collections. It was my thinking, our thinking, that if we moved outside of the institution of the psychiatric hospital or the asylum and into public remembering, we could see the way in which the residue and memory of madness kind of lingers and remains in contemporary society. This book, I have to say, was very widely reviewed. I think it was very impactful from that point of view, in a scholarly sense. It was reviewed in every you know places like Australian Book Review, but also in psychology journals and nursing journals. So it had that kind of really nice landing that we wanted it to have and I think the volume marked a step change in thinking about these topics in Australian social and cultural history.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

There's a messiness around the idea of rupture in histories of mental illness and mental health that coincides with the widespread closure of psychiatric hospitals in the latter part of the 20th century or deinstitutionalisation, so when psychiatric hospitals started to close, as Dolly and I also went on to write about this topic, you see wide processes of rethinking psychiatric care. You see much more community work around remembering hospitals and I see Roslyn Burgess here, so thinking about Callan Park. There have been other projects like that in other parts of Australia and something very odd happened there where often very well-meaning retired medical personnel or people, when institutions were closing down, grabbed things from those institutions medical objects, everyday medical objects, record books, patient records, all sorts of things and took them home and often they're very important and if you can connect with those collections you can end up using them. But I think it sort of says something about people's holding on to the life of the institution in the present. I talk about this as a sort of afterlife of the institution. So that in itself is another strand of historical thinking about these stories and how we might bring them in to the wider narrative. As you can probably hear, I'm very interested in what it is in our present that determines how history of mental illness should be written or could be written. How do we make sense of it? What names do we give it. What are the remainders of mental illness and mental breakdown in public life? So I want to turn now to what I see when I look across the field, and there are three themes that allow us to bring madness in from the margins of Australian history, as Jamie and I argued in our special issue of History Australia, which Effie mentioned.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

Oh, I should say I've got a couple of images here from museum exhibitions. This is quite a confronting image. It's an exhibition that I curated for the Brownless Medical Library at the University of Melbourne just as I finished my PhD and then I left Australia and went to New Zealand. So it was quite an important moment for me and that was that's a wrist cuff and a locked jacket. So the publicity that came alongside that went with that exhibition was very, in some ways very problematic, because a lot of journalists really wanted to sensationalise the storytelling around this exhibition. But there are some incredible artifacts that the Melbourne Museum had. One of my favorite things of all time is an exhibition about Goodner Hospital in Queensland, and this was at the Museum of Brisbane. There was a wonderful day organized for people to speak and I was invited to that. I remember it well because my daughter was only a few months old in 2007, no, maybe 2008, somewhere around there and so we had a wonderful trip and the museum exhibition itself incorporated beautiful artworks by people with lived experience of mental illness and another book I haven't mentioned and of course I can't mention everyone there's so many wonderful people is a strand of labour history that I think is important in this field, and this is Leanne Monk, who was a contemporary of mine as I studied writing about attendance and care and work in institutions.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

But back to the three themes that I think we could consider as we look at history now. First of all, I think we could and should consider psychiatric institutions as social institutions. There's a convergence here of medical and social history. I think we should reconsider our social historical inquiry and think about the way these large institutions in the 19th and 20th century, before their closure, were also social institutions. They had links to welfare institutions. They provided respite care. They bleed in and out of the social world around them, and it would help us to really think about this in our national history. These are not marginal concerns. They're concerns that affect large numbers of the population. There were also medical institutions, as David Roth has shown in his PhD work about Callan Park, where medical somatic disorders were treated. Diseases were treated or, at least, if not treated, noticed. Diseases were treated or, at least, if not treated, noticed. I think if we elevate these institutions as being part of the mainstream of Australian social life, we might kind of make a shift in how we think about this topic. For example, the Bringing them Home report, which really talks about very large-scale institutionalisation of Indigenous peoples, really brought that issue out for Australian history. Thinking over time, studies of out-of-home care, for example, and adoption also fulfil that purpose, and we could also think about the large sets of data that these institutions have contributed to research over time.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

The second theme I want to mention is permeable walls, mobility and movement between social institutions, people who moved in and out of institutions. This was going on for a very long time. My newest project with Effie here is about mental health aftercare and this is a photograph taken by Dr Robin Dunlop, who's assisting us in research, and we've just started the the tentative steps towards looking at their archival material with their agreement and permission, here in Sydney, and we're at the start of that journey to look at how people accessed aftercare. So worlds outside the institution, people who came and went from institutions. And finally, stories of lived experience and consumers. Or touching on another project I've been involved with at the University of Sydney with Hans Polz and a wonderful group of people around consumer networks and advocacy who have come into our project and participated in our project as lived experience researchers, as people who are contributing to the creation of new knowledge. It's resulted in excellent thesis work that pushed the boundaries of what we know and how we might consider that positionality that I started with at the beginning of my talk.

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

How is it that we can incorporate the understandings of what it's like to live with mental illness as part of our history writing?

Professor Catharine Colbourne:

And it's also resulting in a very large collection of oral history interviews with all kinds of people. So that's quite exciting. So these three themes, I think might help us think about how to connect again the social and cultural to the medical and bring into focus some of the ways in which we might see and understand questions like the Indigenous experience of mental illness and among other groups that maybe have been overlooked. And there is scholarship in different pockets in Australia that I haven't touched on here. I think what would be most important would be to understand Indigenous or First Nations ways of knowing about mental illness from cultural perspectives. So transcultural historical work and finally, there are biomedical aspects of this topic that I haven't touched on and there has been work in Australia by Anne Westmore, here on John Cade, who was responsible for discovering lithium, and I think if we combined some of these questions with social histories that I've been outlining, we would have very powerful work indeed. I will leave it there. Thank you very much for your patience and for listening. Thank you, applause.

Dr Effie Karageorgos:

Thank you very much for your patience and for listening. Thank you. Thank you so much, C cathy. That was such a fascinating overview of the movements in histories of mental health over many decades, so I'm going to move on to our next speaker, D dr James Dunk, who is a research fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, where he leads the planetary mental health theme in the ARC Discovery Project, planetary Health History's Developing Concepts. A historian and interdisciplinary researcher, his research for teaching and writing explores how concepts of self and community are changing in the face of planetary crises. He is co-director of the Ecological Emotions Research Lab at the University of Sydney and convenes a community of practice on community-based approaches to climate distress. His book Bedland at Bodney Bay a study of madness and mental health in early colonial Australia won the New South Wales Premier's Australian History Prize in 2020, and his research has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, sustainability, H history of Psychology, A australian Psychologist and Reth history. Thanks so much, J jamie.

Dr James Dunk:

Thanks so much, E effie, for that very warm introduction and Cathy for that wonderful overview. I just wanted to start by adding my own acknowledgement, as we begin, that this is a scatical land and always will be An afternoon in late autumn. As we begin, people arrive in ones and twos at a room in one of the elegant new UTS buildings. We rearrange the room into a circle of chairs and take seats chatting until three or four minutes after the schedule starts, when an older woman suggests that we begin she's travelled an hour and a half to be there. We begin, I explain what we're here for and my friend asks everyone to agree to a set of ground rules that we come with openness and curiosity.

Dr James Dunk:

That we're not going to try and fix things or offer solutions. That we listen carefully and not interrupt each other. That we respect each person's unique experience and not rush towards comparisons, analogies or morals. That we share as much or as little as we feel comfortable, allowing space and time for others. Silence is welcome, because sometimes we need time to process and reflect. And, finally, that this is not a therapy session. We're here to share and listen, to hear and learn, not to unload. We're all responsible for each other for this hour and a half and for ourselves. We then introduce ourselves and say what has brought us here.

Dr James Dunk:

This is a climate cafe run by a group called Psychology for a Safe Climate, that which exists to contribute psychological understanding and support within the community, helping people face the difficult reality around us. They do this by creating space where difficult feelings and emotions can be shared. These can be extremely hard to talk about. It's quite tricky to slip into a complex and escalating planetary crisis in amongst the small talk. Sometimes it's even harder to raise it seriously with friends and family members, because that would mean being honest with ourselves and with others about how the world is changing and what we fear will happen in the months and years to come. That afternoon, a law academic with tears in her eyes apologises for not saying very much about herself. She says she's surprised to find herself so overwhelmed. After the introductions. We simply go deeper. We ask if anyone wants to share what has been happening for them. As they've listened, a retired scientist talks about his generations generations of forward steps and back steps, about his own wide range of personal emotions that he's been through Despair, frustration, anger, guilt. He mentions his spiritual practice that has helped him maintain his sense of self. A public servant discusses her frustration at bureaucracy and inaction, and later on she'll burst into tears. The woman who wanted to start on time speaks about her efforts to save birds and trees in her area, how really staying in a place, caring for it as best she can, is her form of activism or contribution. A young software programmer is there mostly just to hear, and he remains silent. An Iranian PhD student is distressed by how her field of research doesn't seem to be taking. The programmer is there mostly just to hear, and he remains silent. An Iranian PhD student is distressed by how her field of research doesn't seem to be taking the climate crisis anywhere nearly seriously enough. A young activist who lives in the northern rivers holds back tears as she talks about the lasting effects of devastating floods again and again, about the dissonance of going about her life, about burnout. The others, who were strangers a moment ago, show her genuine warmth and care and afterwards the law academic asks if I can pass on a message of support. A man who's worked in finance for decades and now is moving into climate finance has been shocked and appalled by his deep dive into the science. He stays quiet for most of our time but then speaks passionately towards the end about how valuable he's found the time, how people really need to come to terms with what's happening around and inside them. I've been facilitating similar gatherings throughout this year. This one was for Climate Action Week last month.

Dr James Dunk:

These are quite striking gatherings where strangers usually give voice to feelings, sometimes for the first time, protected by the agreements of the start. People are honest with themselves and others. They can say that they're devastated or furious or paralysed or in despair. They can talk about how difficult it is to pretend that everything is fine, how hard it is to know whether to bring a child into the world, how hard it can be to look their grandchildren in the eyes. They can talk about their disgust, their horror, their guilt and shame, their agony at seeing burning ancient forests or screaming koalas, and their quieter feelings. And their quieter feelings Numbness, confusion, wistfulness, emptiness. They can also share their hope, their determination, even moments of happiness and peace, which they grasp and hold on to. But no one makes them do that. No one rushes to end on a positive note or say that everything will work out fine in the end. But there's something about truthfulness and openness that's somehow healing. People feel heard. Even though despair and grief cannot and probably should not be magicked away, people always seem to leave with lighter burdens, they find that they're not alone.

Dr James Dunk:

As you can tell, I'm giving my answer to this question in a roundabout way. As you can see, in the first version of this talk that I wrote, I tried to give a historical view of what mental health is now, pointing to the quite radical contingency of our models and theories of therapies, how the self is a metaphor and one which is often disputed by people across time and place and discipline and school, and especially across the therapist-client relationship. That's a valuable subject, but, as you see, I've decided to focus on what is mental health now, at this moment? What is mental health in a time of planetary crisis? What is mental health when we're shooting for two degrees or two and a half degrees of global heating, when the forests are burning and the cities are choking? What is mental health in the midst of a massive extinction event In the age of loneliness, the Aramissing?

Dr James Dunk:

There's, by now, very robust scientific literature linking climate change and mental ill health. There are very obvious ways in which increasing heat, escalating disasters and the resulting disruptions political, economic, social are already producing a range of psychological effects. There's also an increasing literature about climate distress and anxiety, about a whole range of ecological emotions, these ones that I mentioned in that climate cafe story. It's quite a vigorous debate about using this language of mental health and illness to talk about the personal impacts of climate change, about these emotions, which can be debilitating and paralyzing and isolating in similar ways to psychological conditions. The mental health language tends to be pathologizing and individualistic, though, when what we're really talking about is happening to us all, even though it registers quite differently, or it can register differently in each person. From steadfast deniers of climate change to burned out activists and to parents and professionals and others with their heads down, carefully avoiding reports and media, climate change is affecting all of us one way or another.

Dr James Dunk:

What I'm suggesting is that we're beginning to see mental health quite differently now in this light. Many of these emotions point to deeper connections with the world around us. We're not simply scared about what's happening to us or will happen to our children, but we're grieving the violence and destruction of the ways that we've been living. We're feeling our way towards real bonds across species and a new, deep, practical reverence for life. The fact that these are not marginal experiences and feelings, as more and more research shows, but very common and widely distributed across age, but very common and widely distributed across age, across cultural difference, across country, across class. This also suggests new ways of promoting health and preventing illness. This includes things like peer-to-peer programs, community health and development, articulating common purposes at the community and broader levels, and working together instead of against each other.

Dr James Dunk:

There's much talk in this space about resilience. You might have noticed Individuals and communities who can bear the challenges that are on their way or already here. Part of this is about infrastructure building better kinds of infrastructure but it's also emotional resilience building and sustaining personal and community wellbeing that can help us out and carry us through. But it's also emotional resilience building and sustaining personal and community well-being that can help us out and carry us through. Faced with these needs, our approaches to mental health are changing. Some of this is pragmatism. Researchers have tried, but they can't really see a plausible path to providing individual or even group therapy for the steeply rising number of people who are experiencing climate-related ill health, particularly when these resources are going to be stretched by all the other demands in the crisis energy, shelter, food security, relocation, that sort of thing, and continuing environmental disasters that we're already beginning to reel from. So you may be wondering how do we deal with all this historically.

Dr James Dunk:

Why am I talking about this? Instead of talking about this in abstract terms, let me answer by giving sort of a brief sketch of my current book project, my next project and then a few of the activities I'm involved in which might give a bit of a sketch. So, as been mentioned, I'm a research fellow on a project exploring planetary health, which is a new idea or program about a decade old that tries to reframe human health around the health or integrity of Earth systems. There's little in the way of human health on a sick planet, as they say. This is already, I think, a good thing for historians to be getting into and engaging in. It mixes health history, environmental history, indigenous studies, public health. We're asking where this idea has come from, what it draws on. It's a very contemporary historical project about a recent and a quite important effort to address the crisis.

Dr James Dunk:

But with my background in mental health history, my contribution is to focus on planetary mental health, something that's still emerging. So this means climate change and mental health, the psychological effects of displacement and climate conflict and so on, but also those eco-emotions I mentioned earlier. It's a history of work that's coming to terms with the mental and emotional impacts of living in crisis. As a historian, I'm choosing to frame the project around how psychology has been changing under the weight of crisis for the last 50, 70 years, somewhere around there from the mid-20th century. Working from the premise that our mental health infrastructure what we do around mental health necessarily draws on a psychological framework, there are assumptions involved about what is the psyche, what is the mind, how does it function or misfunction, and how can we help people who are suffering from mental ill health or prevent it happening?

Dr James Dunk:

The project starts with the first real surge of concern that the planet was in crisis, from global resource shortages, total warfare, the prospect of atomic annihilation, through to ozone depletion and population problems and food production, soil desertification, deforestation, climate change, biodiversity collapse towards the end of the century and indeed, a whole set of planetary boundaries that need to be stayed within or else terrible things happen.

Dr James Dunk:

I focus on those who argued from quite early on that these environmental problems were actually human problems. They weren't just happening in our vicinity. They were products of our industries and they were shaped by our culture. There were fundamental questions here about human values and ambitions and anxieties and increasingly, with the news of planetary crisis coming in about how humans were not able to respond effectively and why that was. The next section of the book focuses on those who argued, perhaps a little counterintuitively, that the underlying problem was the anti-human nature of the world, of the modern world of industrialism. Lewis Mumford, an American historian and polymath, argued that these external crises pointed to the social and political, social and personal disintegration that had been going on actually for some time, and that radical renewal was needed, framed around the human person, the self. He wrote a lot about values and needs and human fulfilment.

Dr James Dunk:

The humanistic psychologies emerged in the 1950s, partly filling these gaps. They developed language that was still incredibly popular, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, as you might have come across, the kind of higher needs of the human self after it had reached its basic needs. One way of reading his work is that humans needed more than modern 20th century societies were providing them. Existentialist psychology also sought to incorporate alienation and anxiety and other aspects of modern experience into a more positive view of human growth and development. Not focusing on the neuroses and the psychoses of sort of the Freudian approach, Therapists acted in the spiritual vacuum left after decades of death and destruction, locating validation and meaning in the individual self, which left them at once quite alone, but also searching for real connection and kind of integrity, authenticity. The development of Gestalt therapy at the same time these are all in the 50s can be seen as an attempt to reframe, sort of the frame of reference, to relocate the frame of reference in the midst of an emerging crisis. These therapies were linked with the paradigm-shaking energies of the counterculture of the 60s, which was linked in turn with the budding environmentalist movement. He was a good deal of openness and willingness to countenance other ways to reimagine the self, the mind and psyche to conceive and experiment with quite new visions of how to live. But the human potential movement and the New Age movement drew much of these energies into an often quite indulgent sort of inward-lookingness, and there was a cultural and political backlash as well to these unsettling energies that had been unleashed. Many of the most creative and courageous projects fell under the weight of their own ambitions and naivety and contradictions, and also from the violence and effectiveness of the opposition. It was not so easy to revolutionise selves and societies or to reconfigure human ecology and geopolitics in ways that might have headed off the worst of what's happened since. In 1978, another free-weling historian, Theodore Rojak, argued that the same thing was crushing both the person and the planet the enormous, unthinking scale of human activity, enterprise, production, consumption. Psychologists were increasingly prominent in the anti-nuclear movement, which was developing an environmental awareness, particularly around the possibility of a nuclear winter that would freeze and kill almost everything in the world. As the Cold War thawed and ended in the late 80s into the 90s, many who'd taken up the nuclear threat as a problem in psychology turned to global environmental problems. There was a sort of emerging planetary psychology. People had learned to take the whole planet into view and shifted now from the nuclear problem to environmental problems, which were of a different nature but similarly planetary. They sometimes called what they were doing survival psychology psychology that was applied to problems that threatened the very continuity of the human species. As they saw it, Conservation psychology was a similar sort of project coming out of the conservation science movement.

Dr James Dunk:

How could psychology help to again protect the human world via protecting the world itself? And some of these people connected with these projects developed a field called eco-psychology in the 1990s, merging the problems and techniques of psychology and psychotherapy with the ethics and approaches of deep ecology. Eco-psychology tried to listen to the voice of the earth. It saw human selves and minds as embedded in ecological reality, deeply connected with life. They saw pattern and mind everywhere, and our own mental health and well-being, they said, was inextricably linked with the more than human life around us and to earth itself, which was understood, as in most indigenous cultures, as a living being.

Dr James Dunk:

The final chapter of the book is about the development of climate psychology, in which psychologists and psychiatrists Gestalt therapists, Jungian therapists, eco-psychologists and many others the broad church join in a loose coalition to finally take the climate crisis seriously in relation to mental health and psychology. They've tackled denialism. They've turned to behavioural approaches. How can we encourage behaviour, human behaviour, to actually promote carbon reduction and environmentally friendly solutions and things like that? But that is, as we can imagine, tied a bit to the problematic idea that the global climate crisis can be restored and fixed by individual action. And here's really the crux of climate psychology. We're affected by an unfolding crisis of planetary proportions and great complexity. It's reshaping our worlds and there's really not that much we can immediately do that will be measurably useful. And I guess all of this is coming to say that this is the context of mental health. Now, this is what climate psychology is trying to address by helping with these difficult emotions and feelings, helping people adjust to climate reality, to ecological reality, doing sort of psychoeducation to provide names for things that people are experiencing, to help connect people with each other, to help with isolation, to process ecological grief and anxiety and anger. And then there are the more radical parts of climate psychology that also point towards the deep cultural change that's needed.

Dr James Dunk:

Psychology is drawn into this call for transformation, for a great and deep transition to better and more just and more plausible relationships between persons and societies and species. This involves sometimes quite deep critiques of conventional models of the self and the psyche and of how best to help individuals and communities. Rather than locating psychological issues in infancy or helping individuals experiencing ill health conditions to return to optimal functions in systems that are killing the planet. How can psychology actually help, we ask? How can mental health actually be improved at the same time as the health of ecosystems and earth systems? So these are the core problems of climate. Psychology and really this emerging planetary mental health.

Dr James Dunk:

And history has an important role, as I hope I've been able to gesture towards, in showing the depth and breadth of traditions in and around psychology and mental health that are here to be drawn upon, In showing what movements have arisen and subsided, showing the reactions and how that's played out. It can reflect critically on absences and omissions, including the sometimes tokenistic or extractive use discussion of indigenous knowledges. It can help situate the current and very pressing sense of personal planetocrasis in the other stories that we tell ourselves, which will be necessary as we search for new stories about who we are and how to care for each other and others in generations to come. So that's my project that I'm working on. That's a little bit about one way that history can tackle the world that we're in. I just wanted to mention briefly a few small projects I've been involved in and then we can move to a time of discussion. It actually links with the, the reminding project that Kathy mentioned at the end of her talk.

Dr James Dunk:

The person in common between us is Professor Paul Rhodes at Sydney University. He and I have started the Eco Emotions Research Lab. We won a fellowship to basically work with young people to understand why clinicians weren't dealing very well with climate distress in the therapy kind of room in the clinic, and that has led to a bunch of things quite exciting things for me that I could probably skip over a little of, but to say that I'm now find myself in the position of co-supervising students in psychology and in public health, people who are working on the implications of climate-related childlessness, people who are working on the mental health dimensions of regenerative agriculture and farming, people who are working on family therapy in a time of planetary crisis, and a really interesting person who's looking at experiences and languages of solastalgia across the Pacific and Asia region. I don't know if you know that word. It's a new word that's being coined to name the experience of being homesick at home. So the impacts of witnessing the destruction of a place that's dear to you developed in relation to the Hunter Valley just north. In relation to the Hunter Valley just north.

Dr James Dunk:

Helping guide and shape those studies that are well outside history in many ways has been quite revealing and really enjoyable. I've helped them, I hope, to see the value of historical approaches to the world, including to see where the concepts that they're using have come from, how the past is present, even in the context of a rapidly oncoming future. And then we also convene a community practice. You can see that on the right, which is a group of people who are all engaged in sort of community-based responses to this stuff, People who say we need to move beyond the clinic, we need to work on promotion, on community building, we need to give language and literacy around how we're experiencing and how we're going to move through these things together. And I've been volunteering with Psychology for a Safe Climate, doing the sort of work that I mentioned at the start, but also doing some research with them and working on a white paper. I think that's probably enough from me. So thank you for your attention and I look forward to the questions. Thank you.

Dr Effie Karageorgos:

I just have a couple more things to say. Sorry, I'm not going to let you all go yet, so I'm not going to let you all go yet, so I'm not going to thank myself, but I do want to thanks Jesse. I'd like to thank Jesse actually, yeah, jesse Adam Stein of UTS, who is our vice president, the History Council of New South Wales and the History Now Program Director, who's put together such a fantastic program this year. Also the History Council of New South Wales team, C catherine Shirley, who is here, A amanda Wells and Laura Sayle, as well as the History Council Executive Committee, S stephen Gapps, J julie McIntyre, and I'm not going to thank myself. Thanks also to the State Library of New South Wales event team, in particular Lydia Tasker, C callum McLean and Rachel Franks.

Dr Effie Karageorgos:

And thank you to everyone at the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS. And more broadly, we want to acknowledge the History Council of New South Wales, would like to acknowledge its cultural partners you can see them listed here, including our major funder, the New South Wales Government, via Create New South Wales. And just to say very quickly, thank you for being a wonderful audience and we have our next two sessions are. The next one is Truth Telling and Histories of Genocide and we have. Our next two sessions are the next one is Truth-telling and Histories of Genocide, which is an online-only session on 31 July, and then on 7 August, transnational Design Histories. So I hope to see you all back. Thank you so much, thanks everybody, you so much you.