This week, Professor Rab Houston speaks to Gerry Hastie, a mental health nurse. Gerry trained between 1993-96, when nurse training programmes were changing from being delivered by the Local Health… Read more »
In the first podcast of our new series, Professor Rab Houston is in conversation with Dr Miles Mack, past Chair of RCGP Scotland and a GP partner in Dingwall, Scotland…. Read more »
We’re delighted to announce that the next set of History of Psychiatry podcasts begins next Tuesday, March 13. Series 3, entitled ‘Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts’, is in a… Read more »
I argued in the last podcast that medical theories in colonial Africa had a strong racial element to them, which buttressed colonialism. In this final podcast of my mini-series I’m… Read more »
If you have listened to my series of podcasts on the history of psychiatry in Britain and Ireland you will know that psychiatric relationships are at least partly about power… Read more »
At the end of the last podcast I explained what was special about colonial psychiatry from the 1880s to the 1960s, compared with mental medicine in the United Kingdom. 1)… Read more »
I have been asked by the Scotland Malawi Mental Health Project to prepare a short series of podcasts to act as a component of the training programme for psychiatrists at… Read more »
We are now acutely aware of the effect which viewing or participating in traumatic events can have on people. This last ‘document’ (actually a set of film clips) is about… Read more »
As Series 2 draws to a close, Rab shares his thoughts how the podcasts have been used as a teaching resource in Malawi, and looks ahead to a new mini-series… Read more »
We encountered a coroner’s inquest a few weeks back, presiding over the tragic suicide of an anonymous man. An inquest could deliver a verdict on the cause of death and,… Read more »
Most people with mental disorders are more of a liability to themselves than to others. The same cannot be said of this podcast and the next one, where the threat… Read more »
This series is entitled ‘the voice of the mad’, but sometimes mentally disordered people needed advocates to speak up for them. Normally that would mean a family member or someone… Read more »
As I showed last week, Herman Charles Merivale’s time at Ticehurst was a bit like being in a nice hotel, though he did not like the other ‘guests’. Someone who… Read more »
Last week’s extract and podcast allowed us to see what others thought of the lawyer Herman Charles Merivale, when he was committed to a private asylum. The document from which… Read more »
The most abundant sources for understanding the history of psychiatry are medical case notes, kept by asylum staff. In addition, petitions for admission gave accounts of behaviour that precipitated the… Read more »
Last week I looked at some regulations from Cardiff District Asylum at the start of the twentieth century. One of their main functions was to restrict communication between patients and… Read more »
In this podcast and the next four, we’re going to look at what patients made of entering and being in what we call mental hospitals and what were known until… Read more »
Eighteenth and nineteenth century English coroners’ inquests investigated roughly one death in every twenty. Their main task was to discover if someone else might have been involved or if a… Read more »
These nine examples of letters, diaries, and notes build up to what I think is a compelling picture of the despair and powerlessness felt by suicides. Some were left by… Read more »
This is the first of three podcasts that give different accounts of suicide. We first came across William Cowper a few weeks back, having an anxiety attack that left him… Read more »