The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Stories from the asylum examined in exhibition
University to host insight into lives of patients more than a century ago
The lives of a group of Dundee patients certified as insane more than a century ago will be examined in a new exhibition tackling today’s mental health issues.
The St Andrews University exhibition Face to Face: Stories from the Asylum, will assess the unusual diagnoses of nine people admitted to Dundee Royal Lunatic Asylum at the turn of the 20th Century.
Hosted by Dundee University, it forms part of a project by St Andrews University called “Promoting mental health through the lessons of history”.
Through the study, researchers are exploring how mental disorders have been understood and treated over the past 500 years.
They hope knowledge of these ideas can help shape awareness of mental ill-health and its modern treatment.
PhD student Morag Allan Campbell, who researched the patients’ stories and designed the exhibition, said the purpose was to understand more about the lives of those deemed insane at the time.
She said: “Our understanding of the Victorian lunatic asylum, and our perception of the history of psychiatry, is often fed by myth and fiction.
“The 19th Century saw a massive rise in the building of asylums, as institutional care became the dominant means of caring for the insane, but we know little of the lives of those who entered them as patients and how they experienced mental illness.
“Times may have changed, but the ways in which these patients were vulnerable to life’s stresses, strains and hardships were not so very different.”
The asylum officially opened in April 1820, on a site to the north of the town, before moving further west in 1882 to a new site at Westgreen Farm, near the parish of Liff and Benvie.
The NHS took over control in 1948, and the buildings at Liff finally closed in 2001 following the opening of a psychiatric unit at Ninewells Hospital.
Dundee University’s Archive Services houses the NHS Tayside archive and the Dundee asylum records, with those behind the exhibition using information and photographs from the patients’ case notes.
They will be used to examine the circumstances which led to their committal to the asylum, the dilemmas faced by their families, and the nature of their mental illness.
The project’s lead, Professor Rab Houston of St Andrews’ School of History, added: “We hope the exhibition will prompt viewers to think about the continuities between the experiences of people in the past and in the present day, as well as the very different material environment in which they lived.”
The free exhibition opens tomorrow and runs until June 9 at the Tower Foyer Gallery on Perth Road, Dundee.
Our understanding of the Victorian lunatic asylum, and our perception of the history of psychiatry, is often fed by myth and fiction. MORAG ALLAN CAMPBELL