ABSTRACT
This book is grounded in the belief that there is a need to talk more about mental health from the perspective of both historical and current issues and practices. This is what Catharine Coleborne, internationally renowned scholar in the field of mad studies and histories of mental health and psychiatry, also maintains in her most recent book Why Talk About Madness (2020). Here, Coleborne advocates for the need ‘to imagine new ways of thinking about madness’ (3) and suggests that ‘talking about madness is possible through the archives of institutions, personal stories, the spaces and places of confinement and living histories of these, through exhibition, artworks and through advocacy and community support' (Coleborne 2020: 53), alias what we could refer to as the heritage of mental health. In this book, I explore how ‘talking about madness' can be done through such heritage, in museums; more precisely in a specific type of museum, which I call ‘mind museums'. Mind museums are museums hosted in the disused spaces of a former mental asylum whose display focuses on the history of their premise, and on past and contemporary approaches to the care and treatment of mental health. However, a mind museum is not solely a museum of social history or a museum of the history of psychiatry, nor is it simply a former asylum building restored and conserved as a museum of itself. Rather, it is a site-specific and place-based cultural institution whose work taps into the material and immaterial heritage it conserves and exhibits, with the ultimate goal of promoting awareness and dismantling the stigma and stereotypes surrounding mental health today.
