‘It was like a family’: nurses as change makers in mental hospitals

Calabria, V ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8823-8192 and Oswald, U, 2025. ‘It was like a family’: nurses as change makers in mental hospitals. Family and Community History. ISSN 1463-1180 (Forthcoming)

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Abstract

Psychiatric nurses have long been depicted in the academic literature as peripheral figures in the history of mental healthcare, often cast as subordinates to medical authority or as agents of institutional discipline. Such accounts have tended to obscure how nursing labour shaped the affective life of the mental hospital. Drawing primarily on an oral history dataset of former nurses, other non-medical staff and patients of two defunct mental hospitals, as well as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archival sources, this article reevaluates the occupation of psychiatric nursing as a central conduit for the creation of community and belonging within institutional settings in the second half of the twentieth century. Through close analysis of nurses’ testimonies, as well as those of patients and other staff, the article foregrounds the affective labour and interpersonal skills involved in sustaining the social worlds of psychiatric hospitals. Rather than passive enforcers of institutional control, nurses emerge as key relational actors who mediated between structure and psychosocial rehabilitation, driving progressive change in nursing practice. This article offers a reframing of institutional care, not as solely custodial, but as a complex, negotiated space in which nurses played a foundational role in cultivating care, social connections and continuity of relationships that bear on current policy.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Family and Community History
Creators:	Calabria, V. and Oswald, U.
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
Date:	10 October 2025
ISSN:	1463-1180
Identifiers:	Number Type 2521522 Other
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Laura Borcherds
Date Added:	04 Nov 2025 10:44
Last Modified:	04 Nov 2025 10:44
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/54666

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