Face to Face meeting. Includes Poster Displays (click here for details on how to submit a poster entry)
1.30 pm
Coffee, Registration & Viewing of Posters
2.00 pm
Fashionable Depression from Melancholia to Prozac: Literature, Art and Mental Illness
Professor Clark Lawlor is the author of From Melancholia to Prozac: a History of Depression (Oxford UP 2012), Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (Palgrave 2006), amongst many other works. He is Professor of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at Northumbria University.
Synopsis of lecture:
This talk discusses the paradoxical notion that mental illness can be fashionable. How is it that a crippling phenomenon like depression, formerly known as melancholia, can be viewed as form of cultural capital, a positive sign of personal superiority? The answer lies, at least in part, in the role played by literature and other art forms, historically and in our own time. We will travel on a journey from classical writings to the present day in order to explain how fashionable depression might be possible, and how mental and physical illnesses are culturally constructed.
Learning objectives:
- An understanding that there have been culturally-constructed ‘fashions’ in mental illnesses throughout history and that these have shaped their representation and perception.
- An understanding that depression in previous times, and even in the present day, has been perceived as a sign of superiority and value rather than weakness.
- An understanding of the role of culture and literature in shaping the representation, perception and even desirability of depression throughout history up to the present day.
2.45 pm
The Poetry of Disquiet
Professor Femi Oyebode, retired Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Birmingham
Synopsis of lecture:
Professor Oyebode will draw on the poetry of John Berryman, John Clare, Ivor Gurney, Kobayashi Issa, Elizabeth Jennings, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton to illustrate the range and extent of the poetry that emanates from distemper and disquiet. These writers are all poets who have themselves experienced severe mental disorder and their poetic sensibility and voices are inflected by their experiences.
Learning objectives:
- Introduction to the role of medical humanities in psychiatry
- Illustrate how poetry can influence medical understanding of the lived experience of mental illness and the influence of medical practitioners on patients, and
- Show how privileging language can assist psychiatrists in listening and making sense of clinical encounters.
3.25 pm
Coffee Break & Viewing of Posters
4.00 pm
‘Reading’ the Visual Arts: Some Reflections on the Covers of the British Journal of Psychiatry from 2001 to 2024
Dr Allan Beveridge, retired Consultant Psychiatrist at the Queen Margaret Hospital, Dunfermline. He continues as Covers Editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry, where he is also Co-Book Review Editor (with Professor Femi Oyebode). He is History and Humanities Editor of the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. He has published widely on the history of psychiatry and the medical humanities.
Outline of lecture:
The ‘Psychiatry in Pictures’ series of covers of the British Journal of Psychiatry began in July 2001. As well as attempting to make the cover more interesting and appealing, the inclusion of pictures was following in the tradition of the medical humanities, which contends that the arts can add to our understanding of illness. They can complement biomedical knowledge by offering another perspective and one not filtered through the eyes of the clinician. The arts can convey what it feels like to be mentally distressed and to be a psychiatric patient: they offer an existential viewpoint. They can also provide many other perspectives on mental illness. This paper will consider the visual arts in the context of the artwork that has appeared on the covers of the British Journal of Psychiatry, and do so on a thematic basis.
History of psychiatry
As well as historical archives, pictures can tell us much about psychiatry’s past. They can convey how patients, psychiatric staff and institutions looked. An early sequence featured a painting of the Scottish alienist, Sir Alexander Morison by Richard Dadd. This painting was followed by several pictures from his book, The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases. Morison had commissioned professional artists to create portraits of the inmates of Bethlem hospital and other asylums in the south of England. As well as the portrait of Morison, we have featured several other portraits of doctors, such as Dr John Conolly, the eminent Victorian alienist, who is best known for abolishing the use of restraint of pauper patients at Hanwell Lunatic Asylum in the 1830s
Depiction of mental distress and portraits of patients
The depiction of mental and emotional disturbance has featured recurrently in ‘Psychiatry in Pictures’, and has taken in the experience of alcoholism, grief, suicidal ideation and anorexia. We have also featured many portraits of patients, some by major artists, such as Theodore Gericault and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and some by artists, like Denis Reed and William Bartholomew, who were, themselves, inmates of asylums and who portrayed their fellow-patients.
Work by psychiatric patients
We have featured many works created by psychiatric patients. WAF Browne, Superintendent of the Crichton Royal Asylum in Dumfries in the mid-19th century, amassed paintings by patients from around Scotland, and we have featured several of them. We have also included pictures from the famous collection of patients’ art, assembled by the German psychiatrist and art historian, Hans Prinzhorn from asylums throughout Europe and which is now permanently housed in Heidelberg. In addition, we have displayed work from the House of Artists in Gugging, near Vienna, which was set up by the psychiatrist, Leo Navratil in order that patients could create art, unrestrained by the intervention or supervision of clinicians.
Clinician-artists and professional artists
We have looked at the work of clinician-artists, including the ‘Napoleon of the neuroses’, Jean-Martin Charcot, and also professional artists, many of whom, such as Van Gogh, Charles Doyle, Louis Wain and Leonora Carrington, also suffered from mental illness.
Conflict and art from beyond Europe
The series has examined visual responses to genocide, war and the concentration camp, and has included a stunning last picture by the German, Jewish artist, Felix Nussbaum, murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz in 1944. It has also looked at work from beyond Europe, such as a painting by the renowned Japanese artist and long-term resident in a psychiatric hospital, Yayoi Kusama.
Concluding remarks
The ‘Psychiatry in Picture’ series has covered a wide range of work. As the art historian, Nicholas Tromans has argued, art offers another source for studying and thinking about psychiatry and its past.
4.50 pm
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