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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Engraved in the Body: Ways of Reading Finnish People’s Memories of Mental Hospitals

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AbstractFinnish psychiatric practice has been heavily based on institutionalization. Mental hospitals have thus been part of Finns’ lives in many ways. Our multidisciplinary research group has investigated how experiences in these institutions are remembered today by analysing writings by patients, relatives, personnel and their children, collected in 2014–2015 with the Finnish Literature Society. The memories cover phases of psychiatric care from the 1930s to the mid-2010s. This article presents multiple ways in which experiences that are often difficult verbalize can be interpreted, e.g. by drawing on perspectives from creative, artistic and cultural studies. Collecting and archiving the memories emphasizes their importance as part of national memory. Historical contextualization shows consistencies and inconsistencies in the treatment and organization of psychiatric care in Finland. The analysis of figurative language as a means of conveying traumatic experiences reveals narrative strategies employed to express abusive memories. Artistic research that includes somatic movement practice exemplifies possibilities of researching the memories through corporeality. The examination of the memories of the children of the staff in psychiatric hospitals provides new insights into historical psychiatric hospitals as emotional communities. The different ways of engaging—thematically, corporeally, conceptually, theoretically—with the texts complement each other, reveal the multilayeredness of the memories and help create a richer understanding of the social, cultural and economic significance of the hospitals. Attention to the body, affects and emotions can help generate both new practices, new research questions and new ways of engaging the public with the results of academic research.