Lessons from a lost world: Messages from the mental hospital era

• Published in: Journal of advanced nursing 2018-06, Vol.74 (6), p.1226-1228
• Main Author: McCrae, Niall
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Collective memory; History of medicine; History, 19th Century; History, 20th Century; Hospitals, Psychiatric - history; Humans; Mental Disorders - history; Mental institutions; Nursing; Psychiatric-mental health nursing
• ISSN: 0309-2402; 1365-2648
• DOI: 10.1111/jan.13467

Who are the famous figures of mental health nursing?How does the past inform the future of mental health care?Pertinent questions, you might think. Yet in my experience, as a nurse educator and extracurricular historian of mental health nursing, they are not readily answerable by qualified or budding practitioners. The first would expose a remarkable lack of celebrated figures in our field. General nursing has its heroine in Florence Nightingale, but asking students to name pioneers of psychiatric nursing draws a blank stare. The second question relates to the transformation from institutional to community‐based care. Perceptions of the asylum are often polarized between a dark age of oppression and a pastoral idyll. For nurses trained in this millennium, however, such debate seems scantly relevant, and the older colleague who reminisces about the ‘good old days’ at a defunct hospital has a fleeting audience. Collective memory of the institutional era is fading. But if we do not know where we are coming from, how can we know where we are going?