Patient journeys: Stories of mental health care from Tokanui to mental health services, 1930s to the 1980s

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with finding out about mental health patients - taking this term at the outset - and exploring how their stories might be found in different places from 1912. It considers, then, the shifting identities of patients over time, as well as exploring issues around how historians might productively locate stories and narratives of mental illness, hospitalisation, recovery, and sometimes, cycles of these. Overall, it situates Tokanui patients in a wider framework for mental health histories in New Zealand and seeks to find their stories among the many accounts of mental illness. Where the previous chapter considered changing modalities for treatment, and told patient stories sensitively to capture this from the perspective of a practising psychiatrist, this chapter is written from the point of patients, but also mediated by the view of the historian. It therefore asks readers to think about the ways we tell stories of mental health, as much as about the stories themselves.