Mental Recovery, After-Care and Psychotherapy in Britain's Non-institutional Mental Health Charities, 1879-1939

Between 1879 and 1939, psychiatrists and lay workers collaborated in Britain’s first wave of non-institutional mental health charities to develop methods of mind healing and contribute to the birth of British psychotherapy. A commitment to eliciting mental recovery dominated these activities. For millennia, people have harnessed the influence of one person’s mind upon another’s to elicit and maintain mental well-being. I call this general phenomenon ‘mind healing’. During the 1870s, certain actors working in psycho-medical charities began to use the word ‘psycho-therapeutics’ to describe medical interventions that operated through mind-healing techniques. The oldest charity was the Mental After-Care Association (MACA), which was designed to complete and maintain the return to mental health in patients released recovered from asylums. The MACA’s history provides the backbone of this thesis, which shows how the subsequent charities (Central Association for Mental Welfare, National Council for Mental Hygiene, Child Guidance Council) grew around this Association. Investigating this network generates two linked historiographical interventions. First, the desire to elicit mental recovery dominated late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century psychiatry. This thesis emphasises the value of examining attitudes towards and experiences of recovery and life after mental illness. Second, charity workers’ and psychiatrists’ efforts to shape patients into citizens with the health and moral fibre to survive outside asylums and workhouses meant that the Poor Law and its attendant philanthropic environment influenced the nature of early British psychotherapy. New techniques known as ‘psychotherapy’ were developed, while some older mind-healing traditions were reinterpreted under the new label of ‘psychotherapy’. Over time, mind-healing specialisms, including psychiatric social work, were delineated and their relationships to psychotherapy were contested. In 1939, there remained no consensus about what differentiated psychotherapy from the wider world of mind healing. After around 1910, these negotiations involved the partial and critical integration of psychoanalysis.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Blythe, Hannah

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Mandler, Peter
• Marks, Sarah

• Britain
• Central Association for Mental Welfare
• Charity
• Child Guidance Council
• Community
• Mental After-Care Association
• Mental health
• National Council for Mental Hygiene
• Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Recovery

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/4d43a79e-34d1-4dcf-87ca-cdc0dae12e27/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.108909

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/368858