The arts of care in an asylum and a community 1925-2004: Kenmore Hospital, New South Wales and Canberra, the Australian Capital Territory
Date
2009
Authors
Kordes, Doris
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Abstract
This thesis examines the arts of care in an asylum in New South
Wales (NSW) and a mental health community in the Australian
Capital Territory in twentieth-century Australia, and describes
and compares a range of governmental responses for responding to
persons deemed to be in need of care. The thesis explores
similarities between twentieth-century Australian care techniques
and the key principles underpinning a ‘care system’ that was
developed over 200 years ago. It proposes three twentieth-century
care regimes, each one characteristic of a certain period: Herd
Care, set in an asylum era that emphasised custodialism and
confinement (1925-1958); Therapeutic Community, a period during
which the asylum was reconfigured into a facilitative community
(1959-1983); and Community Care, beginning around 1983, when NSW
asylums were ‘rationalised’, their care techniques fragmented
and outsourced in diverse settings generally referred to
collectively as the mental health community.
Some of the dynamics, continuities and ruptures in
twentieth-century care regimes are analysed. Chapters describe
the landscapes of care. They explore how environmental settings
have been designed to reinforce the care regimes in which they
are mobilised and how they ‘make up’ the possibilities for
action of the subject of care. The dynamics of care between care
providers and their recipients are examined. Some of the
continuities and discontinuities of meanings associated with
‘family’ and ‘community’ in each of the care regimes are
observed. Fieldwork findings are combined with the cultural
narrative of psychiatric primitivism to consider why subjects
have been deemed in need of care, at times in need of protection
and training and at other times in need of discipline and
restraint. The new possibilities for action that have emerged in
Australian twentieth-century mental health governance are
considered, when subjects of care have been encouraged to learn
how to be free
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mental health, care, asylums, community, psychiatry, mental health consumers, mental health patients, families, carers, government, governmentality, freedom, Kenmore Hospital, NSW, Australia
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Thesis (PhD)
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