by Colin Gale

It is a fair bet that not every Museum Worlds subscriber or reader also takes the History of Psychiatry, but published in the latest issue of that journal (September 2015) is an article of potential interest to all museum professionals, despite what might be considered an unpromising title: ‘Without decontextualisation: the Stanley Royd Museum and the progressive history of mental health care’. Its author, Rob Ellis of the University of Huddersfield, uses the story of the genesis of one small, specialist museum in West Yorkshire to interrogate the narratives sustained by exhibition design.

Exhibitions always have narratives, however undeveloped or prosaic. Back in 2010, I reviewed a London exhibition whose title, content and interpretation appeared to me to amount to a refrain of ‘We’ve got a lot of interesting stuff’. In doing so, I meant no particular slight. The approach is as widely adopted in regional and national institutions as it is in the humble local authority museum or gallery. Last time I visited the city of my youth, I saw a loan exhibition advertised with a title (‘Masterpieces from the [name of institution supplied]’) which supported a similar refrain: ‘We’ve borrowed a lot of fabulous stuff from somewhere really famous’.

To my mind, such narratives hold fairly limited appeal…unless, and then only to the extent to which, the stuff really is interesting or fabulous. Ellis argues that the Stanley Royd Museum (recently relaunched as the Mental Health Museum) had a more developed originating story, one emphasising the “largely benign and progressive nature of care” at the Wakefield mental hospital after which the Museum was named.

At first glance, this would seem to distinguish the Stanley Royd Museum from other museums of psychiatry which (according to articles in the 2011 monograph Exhibiting Madness in Museums cited by Ellis) promoted the idea that the “history of madness is one of violence and trauma” and that mental hospitals were “dark places left behind by more enlightened attitudes”. On closer inspection, however, Ellis found that “simple dichotomies of care in the past (bad) and care now (good)” underpinned the foundation of the museum at Wakefield as much as they did elsewhere. The distinguishing thesis was simply one of Stanley Royd exceptionalism. “I think it is true to say that in the life of our old asylum the greatest achievements were attained”, wrote its founding curator…while at the same time admitting in private correspondence that in his museum “we draw a veil…over much of our early history”.

According to Ellis, the Stanley Royd Museum did not achieve a more nuanced presentation of “the great recurring dilemmas” in the history of mental healthcare, “such as the conflict between patients’ freedoms and public safety, between medical versus non-medical approaches to care, between the advantages of segregation from the community and integration within it”. These words, cited by Ellis, were written in the 1980s to express the aspirations for a new museum of psychiatry, this one at Friern Hospital in north London.

These aspirations were never realized; at least, not in the 1980s, and not in north London. In 2015, Bethlem Museum of the Mind was launched on the south London site of the famous Hospital of the same name. Its opening was trailed by a series of curatorial conversations on the Museum’s blog, and by a short piece I wrote for the 2014 issue of Museum Worlds anticipating a space in which recurring themes in the history of mental healthcare would be opened up for consideration and discussion, and one in which “similarity and difference, past and present, continuity and change may be contemplated” so that “narratives of mental health [may] find their place alongside all the other stories that museums and galleries use their collections to tell”.

Ellis notes that Patricia Allderidge, my predecessor as Bethlem Hospital’s Archivist, wrote in the 1970s that “there is now a Mustard Museum at Norwich and a Telecommunications Museum in Taunton [and] it is high time there was a museum of psychiatry” in Britain. His article gives valuable insight into the early attempts and false starts made to establish the narratives needed to sustain one.

COLIN GALE, MA, MPhil, MLitt, DipARM, RMARA, is archivist at Bethlem Royal Hospital and part of a team behind Bethlem’s new Museum of the Mind (opened February 2015). He is a former teaching fellow at University College London’s Department of Information Studies and author of Presumed Curable (2003), After the Hundred Year Rule (2004), and Illustrious Company (2012).