Mise en scène du handicap mental et représentations sociales dans le théâtre allemand contemporain

This article bases its analysis on the shows Mental Institution (2005) from Thikwa Theatre, Endgame from RambaZamba Theatre and The 120 Days of Sodom (2017) from the International Institute for Political Murder. It fits in the search field of the « new disability studies » that analyse a society considered as corrective and normative by studying opposites such as « normal / abnormal » or « abled / disabled ». Which role do performing arts play in the evolution of these social constructs and their medicalization? How do these plays deconstruct oppressive and discriminating mechanisms and can they help bring a collective change of our social behaviors?

Autoethnography & Goffman`s Asylums: Re-Storying Mental Illness

Mental illness narratives occupy a small, unstable place within critical discourse. Within both research and social practices, mental illness is often seen as a limitation instead of an alternative way of knowing, and thus, personal accounts are swept aside in favor of more “objective” research. In 1961, famed sociologist Erving Goffman published Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates after observing the daily life of a mental institution. While the book breathed life into the deinstitutionalization movement, it also undermined the narrative autonomy of the patients that it spoke for. In this paper, autoethnography is used to complement and challenge Goffman’s research, while arguing that there is a better way of positioning the patient narrative within mental health research. It is a way of reconciling my identities as a person with mental illness and an academic, and bringing lived experience to the forefront of mental health discourse, where it belongs.

Autoethnography & Goffman`s Asylums: Re-Storying Mental Illness

Mental illness narratives occupy a small, unstable place within critical discourse. Within both research and social practices, mental illness is often seen as a limitation instead of an alternative way of knowing, and thus, personal accounts are swept aside in favor of more “objective” research. In 1961, famed sociologist Erving Goffman published Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates after observing the daily life of a mental institution. While the book breathed life into the deinstitutionalization movement, it also undermined the narrative autonomy of the patients that it spoke for. In this paper, autoethnography is used to complement and challenge Goffman’s research, while arguing that there is a better way of positioning the patient narrative within mental health research. It is a way of reconciling my identities as a person with mental illness and an academic, and bringing lived experience to the forefront of mental health discourse, where it belongs.

Dziekanka/Tiegenhof – stan wiedzy o funkcjonowaniu zakładu podczas II wojny światowej

The article presents the state of research on the history of the mental institution known as Dziekanka during World War II. New information discovered by German authors and increasing knowledge about the course of Aktion T4 makes it possible to verify erroneous findings and contributes new elements to the overall picture. For instance, it is demonstrated that not all of the murdered patients lost their lives as part of Aktion T4, or that – despite the claims of certain Polish authors – Tiegenhof was also a site where treatment and research did take place. The paper offers an overview of literature concerned with Dziekanka/Tiegenhof, discusses extermination of its patients, the individuals responsible and the connection with Aktion T4, as well as the significance of the institution in the Warthegau province; the question of the number of victims is also addressed.

Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions

This book is a history of the federal mental institution Saint Elizabeths Hospital and its relationship to Washington, DC’s African American community. Founded in 1855 to treat insane military personnel and the District’s civilian residents, the institution became one of the nation’s preeminent research and teaching psychiatric hospitals. From the beginning of its operation, Saint Elizabeths admitted black patients, making it one of the few American asylums to do so. The book charts the history of Saint Elizabeths from its founding to the late 1980s, when the hospital’s mission and capabilities changed as a result of deinstitutionalization and its transfer from the federal government to the District. The book makes two main arguments. First, ideas of racial difference figured prominently in how hospital officials understood the mission of the institution and subsequently designed and operated it, in how hospital officials understood mental disease and developed therapies to address it, and in how patients experienced their confinement. This history reveals the ways the American psychiatric profession engaged in an unarticulated project that conceptualized the white psyche as the norm. Second, this book argues that African Americans—both patients and nonpatients—were not powerless people acted on by large institutional forces. Black Washingtonians were active agents in their interactions with the hospital, from more overtly political and collective endeavors, such as calling for investigations of the mistreatment of black patients and advocating for the hospital’s integration, to the more individualized and quotidian attempts to manage their own or their loved one’s therapeutic experience.

The Kirkbride buildings in contemporary culture (1850–2015): from ‘moral management’ to horror films

The so-called ‘Kirkbride Plan’ is a type of mental institution designed by the American psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbride. The Kirkbride-design asylums were built from 1848 to the end of the nineteenth century. Their structural characteristics were subordinated to a certain approach to moral management: exposure to natural light, beautiful views and good air circulation. These hospitals used several architectural styles, but they all had a similar general plan. The popularity of the model decreased for theoretical and economic reasons, so many were demolished or reused, but at least 25 of the original buildings became protected places. Over the years, surrounded by a legendary aura, these buildings have become a leitmotif of contemporary popular culture: ‘the asylum of terror’.

Harold (Mitch) Mitchell’s role in the demise of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire

In Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire, Stanley Kowalski has often been seen as the main reason why Blanche DuBois mentally falls apart at the end of the play. This is emphasized by the fact that he rapes her and that she subsequently is committed to a mental institution. However, I find that the role of Harold (Mitch) Mitchell thereby is downplayed and underestimated. This article argues that he in fact is the real cause of Blanche’s psychological downfall. Critics such as Judith J. Thompson refer to Mitch as elevated to the romanticized ideal of Allan Grey, Blanche's late husband. Blanche sees a potential new husband in Mitch, and when she realizes that he knows about her troubled past, she mentally collapses. While Stanley’s final act certainly is cruel and devastating, Mitch’s rejection of Blanche is what essentially sets off her final madness.

The Tragic Hero of Childbed Fever

The situation in the Vienna hospital in the mid-1840s was certainly grim. The hospital offered medical care to indigent mothers, but in one maternity ward women faced a ghastly one-in-ten chance of dying from childbed fever (today’s puerperal sepsis, a bacterial infection). Could nothing be done? Enter Ignaz Semmelweis (Figure 24.1), who, so popular stories typically tell us, “notices that [the attending medical] students move between the dissection room and the delivery room without washing their hands.” The students offering care are themselves infecting the patients with putrid matter from cadavers! Semmelweis institutes handwashing, and the mortality rate soon drops by an impressive 90%. However, “despite the dramatic reduction in the mortality rate in Semmelweis’ ward, his colleagues and the greater medical community greeted his findings with hostility or dismissal.” Semmelweis’s hypothesis “was largely ignored, rejected or ridiculed. He was dismissed from the hospital and harassed by the medical community in Vienna, which eventually forced him to move to Budapest.” Further injustice seemed to follow. “Despite various publications of results where handwashing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis’s observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings.” “The years of controversy and repeated rejection of his work by the medical community caused him to suffer a mental breakdown. Semmelweis died in 1865 in an Austrian mental institution. Some believe that his own death was ironically caused by puerperal sepsis,” the very disease he had tried to prevent. “Semmelweis saved the lives of countless women and their newborn children. He showed how a statistical approach to the problems of medicine could demolish popular but mystical theories of disease. His work prepared the way for Pasteur’s elucidation of germ theory. He turned obstetrics into a respectable science. And he revealed how professional eminence and authority could breed crass stupidity and bitter jealousy.”