Oral histories of the Nottinghamshire mental hospitals: exploring memories of giving and receiving care

Calabria, V ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8823-8192, 2020. Oral histories of the Nottinghamshire mental hospitals: exploring memories of giving and receiving care. PhD, Nottingham Trent University.

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Abstract

The closure of the mental hospitals in the UK in the twentieth century has potentially obscured the relevance of psychiatric hospitals as therapeutic environments. The thesis explores the impact of closing the large-scale mental hospitals in the latter part of the twentieth century and the move to care in the community on service users and staff 30 years since their closure. This research has gathered the oral histories of older mental health service users who received care in Nottingham’s mental hospitals and those of the staff that provided it in order to understand what has been lost through the modernisation of mental health services, where the relationships between staff and patients are typically short-term and veer towards crisis management. Participatory Action Research has informed the overall research involving participants in all stages of the research project in order to co-construct a history of giving and receiving care with former patients and staff in the now closed psychiatric hospitals in Nottinghamshire. The findings provide new insights into the value of inpatient care within psychiatric institutions and how it has been affected in the shift away from asylum care. Despite elements of social control within the mental hospitals reported by participants, the Nottingham mental hospitals were largely perceived as therapeutic environments, providing rich sources of social, emotional and practical support through the social networks that existed therein, including the social and spatial value of internal and external spaces in the provision of structured rehabilitation for recovery. Participants experienced a sense of dispossession with the advent of care in the community,which did away with the hospital communities that offered valuable occupation, structured social activities, refuge, asylum, and a place of belonging for many.

Item Type:	Thesis
Creators:	Calabria, V.
Date:	April 2020
Rights:	This work is the intellectual property of the author. You may copy up to 5% of this work for private study, or personal, non-commercial research. Any re-use of the information contained within this document should be fully referenced, quoting the author, title, university, degree level and pagination. Queries or requests for any other use, or if a more substantial copy is required, should be directed in the owner(s) of the Intellectual Property Rights.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	24 Jun 2020 10:18
Last Modified:	31 May 2021 15:19
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/40097

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