School of History and Philosophy of Science
RESEARCH SEMINAR
[The University of Sydney]
[https://d31hzlhk6di2h5.cloudfront.net/20240312/1b/a4/88/03/e95181de0f6f29ce7859bfff_1276x854.jpg]
Aftercare as a rewriting of mental health history: the case of
Australia to 1920
Professor Catharine Coleborne (University of Newcastle)

Dates: Monday, 18/3/2024
Time: 5:30pm
Venue: New Law Building (F10), Level 3, Room 344
How to register: Free, no registration required

Abstract: In my work Madness in the Family, I pioneered a focus on 214 cases of 
family interactions with institutions using a series of linked records (case 
material, correspondence, visitors’ books, records of leave of absence and 
trial home visits) that showed a deeper engagement between family, medical 
authorities, and institutional practices. This work provides me with a model 
for a new project about mental health aftercare between 1900 and 1960. 
Aftercare existed before psychotropic medications, community solutions and 
mental health support started to become the mainstay of post-institutional care 
from the 1960s when the processes of deinstitutionalisation began.

While my past work opened the question of the instability of the archive in the 
creation of knowledge about mental illness, it also pointed to the way that 
institutions operated in a dialogue with families and friends about mental 
breakdown. That dialogue contained clues about the way institutions reached 
into communities, as well as about experiments in care at an early stage of 
Australia’s evolving approach to mental health treatment. This paper for 
discussion will share my continued interest in the possibilities suggested by 
that dialogue of the latter decades of the nineteenth century by focusing on 
new work-in-progress based on some sources from the available records of After 
Care NSW and Gladesville Hospital to 1920. Given that aftercare was and is a 
form of assistance for people when they leave mental hospitals, such as the 
provision of practical help by charitable organisations to reintegrate them 
into work, families, and communities, I am curious about what was happening 
both outside and also between institutions during this period.

Studying extra-institutional care means examining the interactions, flows, 
transfers, and engagements between people with mental illness and those who 
sought to assist them. This ‘mobility of practices’ suggested by forms of 
aftercare - as geographer Tim Cresswell might say -  shatters previously held 
concepts of ‘closed institutions’, at the same time suggesting possibilities 
for models of mental health care in our present.


Bio: Professor Catharine Coleborne holds a new ARC Discovery Project grant with 
Dr Effie Karageorgos at the University of Newcastle focused on mental health 
aftercare from 1900 to 1960. Her next forthcoming book is Vagrant Lives in 
Colonial Australasia: Regulating Mobility, 1840 to 1910 (Bloomsbury 2024). 
Cathy has been based at the University of Newcastle since late 2015.

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