Madness in the Family: Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World, 1860–1914 (review)

Within the thriving sub-field of colonial histories of psychiatry, Catharine Coleborne’s book represents a welcome change. This is true both for the understudied region with which she is concerned and also for the author’s conceptual interest, not in the nature of “madness” per se, but in the often mundane but extreme stresses and strains of families as glimpsed through the records and correspondence of four key asylums in late-nineteenth-century southeastern Australia and New Zealand. The official records of 215 patients reveal a poignant social history of a struggling population (there would have been many like it the world over) coming to grips with isolation, poverty, and overwhelming responsibilities for one’s kith and kin. Coleborne’s archive includes a wealth of letters tucked away within the clinical case files, and these reveal the extent to which family members interacted with these institutions and negotiated their loved ones’ care. The institutions concerned are revealed to be fluid and dynamic spaces as opposed to monolithic bedlams concerned primarily with confining, punishing, or othering the mad. Instead, the book privileges stories of the dire life circumstances of individuals who moved in and out of the asylum as they struggled with exhaustion, poverty, the weight of extended family obligations, isolation, alcoholism, and illness.

Although the book’s subtitle lays claim to a history of “insanity and institutions,” this is neither an intellectual history of psychiatry nor an institutional history of the early asylum. Psychiatry is not altogether absent, however. Many individuals are shown to have exhibited signs of clinical insanity or mental strain, as described vividly by their families’ complaints about delusions, violent outbursts, paranoia, or inconsolable depression. However, the author’s approach is to outline thematically the myriad ways in which the staffs of institutions came into contact with families as a means for uncovering the everyday pressures, fears, and guilt families endured. It is often less about the experience of “madness” than about the very ordinary insecurities of daily life in the Australasian colonial world in the late nineteenth century.

Refreshingly, the book foregoes a discussion of anachronistic psychiatric diagnoses of so-called lunatics, presenting instead a more interesting social history of gloom and exhaustion. The innovation of the book is to pay close attention, not just to those individuals (often women) committed to the asylum, but also to the significant impact one’s committal might have on husbands, wives, children, and extended family back home. In such a tenuous setting, one person’s mental breakdown could portend an entire family’s demise.

The chapters are thematic, opening with a discussion of the colonial asylum and the general debates about insanity as they existed in the Australasian colonies. The second chapter addresses the nature of these debates as expressed within white settler colonies, which, as in eastern and southern Africa, prompted a preoccupation with ideas about race, heredity, and the tenuous state of future generations amidst very uncertain physical, political, and social landscapes. In the third chapter, Coleborne turns her attention to the “Language of Insanity,” focusing on the reality of mental illness or mental breakdown as experienced and described by individuals. Such accounts might mirror institutional concerns and assertions or might sit in stark contrast with doctors’ understandings of such stress and despair. The next chapters elaborate on primary source material, such as letters from patients and family members in chapter 4 and detailed records of payment in chapter 5, which is surprisingly revealing of the additional pressures, resistance, and accommodations involved in family and institutional negotiations. This brings to the fore questions about family versus state responsibility for the care of the mentally ill, particularly in the absence of a formal state welfare system or poor law. In some cases, the sources reveal detailed maintenance logs kept by asylums, outlining the harsh circumstances under which people lived and the calamities they faced...