Bridging the Gap Between AI and Reality • Rhodes, Greece
Time: Wednesday, 5.11
Room: Room C
Authors: Oonagh Walsh , Stuart Clancy
Abstract: Mental health historiography has focused almost exclusively on the individual’s experience as an in-patient of large asylums and psychiatric hospitals. The surviving archives reveal complex worlds, and offer insights into power structures, the development of medical therapies, the relationships between state providers and local administrators, and the detail of day-to-day of lives led behind the asylum walls. However, they are largely silent in terms of the patient experience prior to admission, and after discharge, unless the person is subsequently readmitted. Using spatial epidemiological methods as well as dataset linkage and HGIS, this paper proposes an analysis of a late nineteenth-century patient cohort to restore individuals to their whole life cycle. Analysis will use categories including occupation, gender, age, class, and diagnosis to integrate the institutional experience with the whole patient life, and offer insights into the impact of a period of hospitalisation on the life cycle.