'Silent and censured travellers'? Patients' narratives and patients' voices: perspectives on the history of mental illness since 1948.

Abstract

This article seeks to demonstrate how patients' oral testimony can usefully contribute to--and challenge--the history of mental illness in the second half of the twentieth century, through the use of the concept of narrative frames. This work has emerged from a broader study which seeks to examine shifts and continuities in the experiences of mental illness from the introduction of the NHS to the present day, through a study of Oxfordshire. Psychiatry itself and the historiography of psychiatry have in many ways silenced the patient or service user. Nevertheless, acceptable means of communication have always existed, and these are revealed through patients' narratives. In-depth analysis of 21 interviews with patients has led to the emergence of three key acceptable narratives or narrative frames, these being: stories of loss, tales of survival and self-discovery, and narratives of the self as patient. Through examination of three key frames by which patients and users have understood and presented their illness experiences, this article seeks to trace the interactions between the general and the particular, the social and the individual, and to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the recent history of mental health and illness.