🎧 Mental Health in Victorian Britain
Archive of Dan Snow's History Hit 🎧
•
26m
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK so we’ve got a special episode exploring the surprising way Victorians approached mental health treatment in the 19th century. Oral historian Stella Man from the Glenside Hospital Museum in Bristol tells Dan how the Victorians get a bad rap but in truth, they took a very forward thinking occupational approach. With no real medicines to prescribe at that time, psychiatric institutions like Glenside turned to exercise, nature, rest and finding meaningful activities and work for patients to do. 50% of patients who were admitted were able to leave the institution after treatment.
Stella tells the stories of several patients that spent time at Glenside and how the approach to mental health treatment in Britain changed for the worse over the 20th century and is now returning to the same ideas prescribed by the Victorians.
You can find out more information or visit Glenside Hospital Museum here:
https://www.glensidemuseum.org.uk/
If you are struggling with your mental health you can find advice and resources here: https://www.mind.org.uk/
Produced by Mariana Des Forges
Mixed and Mastered by Dougal Patmore
Up Next in Archive of Dan Snow's History Hit 🎧
-
🎧 Margery Kempe: Medieval Mysticism o...
Margery Kempe: mystic, autobiographer…schizophrenic?
In honour of Mental Health Awareness week, Dr Cat Jarman is joined by Dr Alison Torn from Leeds Trinity University to explore the complicated legacy of a woman who is credited as both the first English autobiographer, and case of schizophrenia...
-
🎧 The 1650s: Britain's Decade Without...
In 1649 Britain was engulfed by revolution. Charles I was executed for treason and within weeks the English monarchy had been abolished and the House of Lords discarded. The people, it was announced, were now the sovereign force in the land. What did this mean for the decade that would follow?
A...
-
🎧 Pandora
According to Greek myth, Pandora was the first human woman - moulded from the earth by Hephaestus on the instruction of Zeus himself.
We've all heard of Pandora's box, but in actual fact it was no such thing. Instead it was a jar containing all the evils of humanity, but even these contents of t...
