History Now: Histories of mental health

Catharine Coleborne and James Dunk discuss the depth of historical writing about mental illness in Australia and reflect on its resonance in the present moment; how can we write the history of mental health now?

This event is held in partnership with the University of Newcastle’s Future of Madness Network

Professor Catharine Coleborne is a historian at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales. She has written histories of mental illness and institutions, colonial families and health, and museums, collections and exhibitions of psychiatric histories and objects. She is the co-editor (with Matthew Smith, Strathclyde University) of a successful book series with over 30 titles since 2014, ‘Mental Health in Historical Perspective’ (Palgrave). In 2020, she published a short book as part of that series called Why Talk About Madness? This book is designed to provide readers with an entry point to the large and sprawling field of the history of mental illness and institutions. With Dr Effie Karageorgos, she is pursuing a new history of mental health aftercare, funded by the Australian Research Council, and together they lead the Future of Madness Research Network. Catharine’s most recent book examines the histories of colonial vagrancy: Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia: Regulating Mobility, 1840 – 1910 (Bloomsbury 2024).

Dr James Dunk is a Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, where he leads the planetary mental health theme in the ARC Discovery Project Planetary Health Histories: Developing Concepts. A historian and interdisciplinary researcher, his research, teaching and writing explores how concepts of self and community are changing in the face of planetary crises. He is co-director of the Ecological Emotions Research Lab at the University of Sydney and convenes a community of practice on community-based approaches to climate distress. His book Bedlam at Botany Bay, a study of madness and mental health in early colonial Australia, won the NSW Premier’s Australian History Prize in 2020, and his research has been published in New England Journal of Medicine, Sustainability, History of Psychology, Australian Psychologist and Rethinking History.

Dr Effie Karageorgos (chair) is a Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research focuses on histories of conflict, violence, protest, gender and psychiatry. She is co-Chief Investigator on a 2024–26 ARC Discovery Project focused on mental health aftercare with Professor Catharine Coleborne. She co-edits Health and History, the official journal of the Australian and New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine and is Treasurer of the History Council of New South Wales. She co-convenes the Future of Madness Network with Professor Coleborne and the Social Production of Mental Health seminar series with Dr Natalie Hendry. Her next book on quiet protest during the Vietnam War, emerging from a State Library of New South Wales David Scott Mitchell Fellowship, will be published by UNSW Press.

Image caption: Untitled collage, from Towards an Ecological Self: Mapping Our Relations with Trees, fortyfivedownstairs gallery, Naarm, 2022, hosted by Psychology for a Safe Climate, Sydney Environment Institute, Climarte, and Maridulu Budyari Gumal SPHERE. Image provided by James Dunk. [image cropped]