Dr Hills Casebook - blog 2

The second instalment of Robert Fairclough’s blog about the Change Minds project which unites history, mental health, creative writing and theatre.

This week, I really began to get a sense of how committed the team was to the project via some disturbing facts about mental health history.

Vicky had been ‘reading around’ her subject to great effect: Norman Longmate’s ‘The Workhouse: A Social History’ had revealed that these establishments – which housed the destitute – pinned an identifying symbol to the clothes worn by the poor to identify them as inmates. Furthermore, they also sometimes took the shocking step of clipping the top off a person’s ear for the same reason.

To our modern sensibilities, this is an alarming example of discrimination. As the discussion continued, a disturbing practice came to light in contemporary mental institutions: the discovery of electricity seemed to be the be the green light for “a real Doctor Frankenstein” in Sussex to use his patients as human guinea pigs to see what the effect on their behaviour was (and, to be fair, it has been proven that some electric currents – carefully applied – can have a beneficial effect on certain areas of the brain).

By the time I asked a question about when lobotomies were introduced – surprisingly, to me, at least, in the early 20th Century – we’d drawn a picture of shocking, or at the best, indifferent, treatment of the poor and mentally ill (in the Norfolk County Asylum, the two go together), which continued until relatively recently, often with their human rights flagrantly ignored.

That’s why the Dr. Hill’s Casebook is so important. A patient like Samuel Elk [?], who the Devil apparently instructed “to do bad deeds”, and responded to Dr Hill’s “pro-active and compassionate” approach, was a real person who suffered. Diligent research and the skill of the actors in the Upshot Theatre Company will ultimately bring Samuel to life on stage, hopefully helping to ensure that the callous approaches to mental health and human dignity we discussed last Tuesday are gone for good.

Some hope, some of you might say, but for me this is one of the essential principles that underpins Dr. Hill’s Casebook.

'Robert Fairclough writes on a variety of subjects, including mental health and popular culture (sometimes both at once). He has written six books, contributes to magazines and websites, and writes regular blogs for The Restoration Trust. He can be contacted on robmay1964@outlook.com, and his website can be viewed at www.robfairclough.co.uk '