Madness in the Family

A woman, known to be under psychiatric care, is facing charges relating to a recent murder in Hamilton. When incidents like this happen there are inevitably calls for people with serious mental health issues to be locked up for good but Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences historian, Associate Professor Catharine Coleborne, says that's not always the right or most practical solution. 

Dr Coleborne recently wrote a book called Madness in the Family - Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World 1860-1914.  She says her research has shown that from the time 'insane asylums' were built in New Zealand and Australia, patients have been released into the community for short or extended periods. "Even then it wasn't practical to confine every patient forever, and naturally there were elements of risk associated with letting people go home", she says. 

Dr Coleborne received a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden grant to research her book which involved reading hundreds of patient records at National Archives in Auckland, Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales.  "I found patients came and went from their asylums with surprising frequency.  It was not a case of locking troublesome family members away and throwing away the key.  Quite the opposite, it was very much a revolving door.  Some people had seven or eight hospital stays over a decade at a time when medications were almost non-existent. There were restraints, rest therapies, alcohol and other sedatives, and water treatments including shower and plunge baths."

Dr Coleborne's book is aimed at academics but she says it has broader implications for our own contemporary understandings of the problem of mental breakdown, institutionalisation and the ways that families coped with these, and how they also deployed innovative strategies and came up with solutions for care. Institutions, far from being cruel places, helped to ease some family difficulties.