In the Frame for May 2013

This month, the Friend’s Secretary has chosen to highlight a painting displayed at the recent Museum of the Mind exhibition at the Bethlem Gallery: Russell Barton’s Potential Murderers?  The sheer size of this picture means that it is rarely possible to display it at present, but it provides an interesting talking point. One interpretation, used in the exhibition, is that the painting questions one of the common public misconceptions surrounding mental ill-health. The “potential murderers” of the title might thus refer to the seated figures of patients along the wall, the bowed heads and subdued attitudes indicating how ludicrous the generalisation can be. As Barton himself apparently said, “In our mental hospitals today, there are thousands of harmless patients, people who have never done harm, people who never will do harm.”

Yet the figure of the nurse in the foreground is the first thing that draws the viewer’s attention, her face cold and unsmiling, perhaps ignoring those in her care. Meanwhile, the stark walls of the institution fill most of the background: perhaps it is this, and those who run it, that is suggested to have the potential for murder. Barton, who died in 2002 after a lengthy psychiatric career, was an advocate for community care and asylum closure. His key textbook – Institutional Neurosis – argued that asylum care generated a neurotic condition in patients over and above their original ill-health. Colleagues considered that Barton’s experiences at Shenley and Severalls Hospitals (following his training at the Maudsley under Aubrey Lewis) encouraged this thesis: this painting was probably painted during his time at the latter, in the 1960s. The extreme nature of the painting’s title might also reflect the doctor’s early experiences: as a medical student, in the aftermath of the second world war, he volunteered to attend the survivors at Belsen, one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps.

The starkest contrast in the painting is that between the muted colours of the hospital walls and the bright blue and green landscape beyond. One lone patient stares, perhaps wistfully, through the railings at this apparent utopia beyond. A rather romanticised view, perhaps, reflecting the hopes of those who fought to close asylums in the late twentieth century. An addition to Barton’s obituary in The Psychiatrist, from a friend and colleague, noted that “He never regretted his role in the deinstitutionalisation movement, although he recognised, like the rest of us, that the actual performance fell well short of what he would have wished to see happen.”¹

1 Miodrag Ristich, “Obituary of Dr Russell Barton” The Psychiatrist (2003) 27: 196.

held by Jane Fradgley: A Symposium on Restraint

On the evening of 31 July, the MRC SGDP Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Damaging the Body seminar series will co-host a public symposium on the topic of restraint and strong clothing in mental health care. This event accompanies artist Jane Fradgley’s held exhibition, on display in the foyer from 10th July to 27th September. This series of striking photographs of garments from the Bethlem collection was funded by Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity and, as previously noted on this blog, the artist has captured these late nineteenth and early twentieth-century garments in a very different manner from the usual methods of displaying such objects (previously explored in Curatorial Conversations IV).

The exhibition is currently on display at Plymouth Arts Centre (until 16 June). However, Jane’s photographs have already opened up debate around the topic in London. Last year, the Bethlem Gallery hosted a focus group on “strong clothing”, bringing together a variety of people within the mental health field: service users, clinical and curatorial staff, therapists and art practitioners. The garments and their history were exhibited, and a lively debate explored the various forms of coercion adopted within contemporary health care and the relation of the historical garments (and their display) to this context.

The term “strong clothing” was used by late nineteenth-century psychiatrists to refer to garments used in English asylums to restrict movement. These doctors wished to distinguish the clothing they used from the “revolting instruments of mechanical coercion” rejected by the “non-restraint” movement of the 1840s and ‘50s. While English asylum superintendents at this time claimed to have abandoned all methods of mechanical restraint, physicians of the 1880s and 1890s re-introduced restraining garments by claiming them to be something else entirely. Strait-jackets (generally known as strait-waistcoats) and handcuffs were replaced with “strong dresses” and “padded gloves”, placed on a relatively small number of patients to prevent self-inflicted injury or the destruction of clothing and other items. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, strait-jackets appear to have returned to some institutions.

Today, it is often assumed that the exhibition of restraining garments will be distressing to viewers: a stark reminder of past cruelties. Participants in the focus group, however, exposed a much more nuanced view of these items. The forthcoming symposium will invite a wider audience - including clinicians, historians, artists and service users - to explore what restraint is, and how (and if) we can ever draw a line between care, cure and control. Following short presentations from a variety of practitioners, the debate will be opened up to the audience.

Tickets are free, but places are limited and must be booked in advance at: heldsymposium.eventbrite.co.uk

Doors will open at 5pm, with a reception and chance to view the exhibition. The symposium will begin at 6pm, ending by 8pm. The artist will be releasing a book associated with the exhibition later in 2013, funded by the Maudsley Charity.

Location: MRC SGDP Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, 16 De Crespigny Park, Denmark Hill, SE5 8AF (within the Maudsley Hospital site).

Gods, Devils and Dreams: New Exhibition Opens at the Bethlem Gallery Next Week

Next week, on 24th April, a new exhibition opens at the Bethlem Gallery. Peter Harry Lewis White’s Gods, Devils and Dreams will run until 17 May, featuring large-scale paintings and detailed pencil drawings. His work depicts visions and dreamscapes that take the viewer on a journey into abstracted landscapes, figures and happenings. “My exhibition reflects my experiences and my creations. There are some windows into my memory and mind, but the rest is just colour and form.”

The exhibition will be open for Museums at Night 2013, a nationwide festival of late openings and events at museums and galleries, in which Bethlem is participating on Thursday 16 May. The Museum will be open until 7.30pm, with a special talk on Spiritualists and Spook-Spotters in the nineteenth century at 6.30 providing the perfect follow-up to an exhibition visit. How did psychiatrists explore hypnosis and spiritualism in late nineteenth-century Bethlem? What were the hospital’s connections with the Society for Psychical Research? And how were ‘spooky’ goings-on thought to help us explore the relationship between mind and body?

Gods, Devils and Dreams opens on 24th April (3 – 6pm) and continues 25th April – 17th May

Wednesday – Friday 11am – 6pm

Gallery and Museum also open Saturday 11th May, 11am – 5pm

Reversible Owl – Peter White

Ikons at St. Giles Church, Camberwell – Imma Maddox

In May 2013, Bethlem Gallery artist Imma Maddox will display her ikons in St Giles Church, Camberwell (Church Street, SE5), painted using traditional methods dating back to Roman times. ‘Icon’ simply means ‘image’, but has often been associated with religious paintings of a particular style. The distinctive panels are prepared using animal glue and whiting, and painted with egg tempera. It is this egg that gives the colours the warm, soft glow of the ikon. The colours can remain fresh and vivid for centuries, unlike oil paintings which crack and flake.

Imma has been painting ikons for about fifteen years, and her first piece was the ikon of St Michael, which hangs on the organ case at St Giles. She paints cats and people, hands and birds, using these images to offer up a prayer for creation.  Imma has recently had additional training in the traditional techniques, which are are described in detail on the webpage for the Icon Workshop at the Saint Gregory of Sinai Monastery.

The ikons can be viewed at weekly services, and also at a series of concerts taking place in the church in May. Every Wednesday, the church will be open from 7pm to view the ikons, and the concert will start at 7.45.

In the Frame for April

This month’s In the Frame is ‘Red and Blue Abstract’, an anonymous work produced as part of a series of experiments, overseen by Maudsley doctors Eric Guttman and Walter Maclay in the 1930s, into the hallucinogenic effects of the drug mescaline. Since “mescaline hallucinations are predominantly, though not exclusively, visual,” they wrote, “a description of them by  means of drawings and pictures could be expected to be somewhat more impressive, and perhaps more realistic, than a verbal account”. “Artists who were willing to volunteer their services” were “given enough mescaline to cause hallucinations and were asked to sketch what they saw”.¹

The Archivist has chosen to highlight ‘Red and Blue Abstract’ on the strength of his reading of Oliver Sacks’ latest book, Hallucinations, which (according to one reviewer) is “a superb synthesis of the literature on these arresting, disturbing and sometimes terrifying phenomena” as well as “a profound work of humanity”.² In the public imagination, hallucinations are most closely associated with the experience of schizophrenia, and are often highly feared on that account, but Sacks writes relatively little about schizophrenic hallucinations (phenomena that demand separate consideration, in his view), preferring to focus his attention on hallucinations arising from “organic” psychoses – “the transient psychoses sometimes associated with delirium, epilepsy, drug use, and certain medical conditions”.³

Anyone who has read the description, cited by Sacks, of the drug-induced hallucinations written by Daniel Breslaw – a participant in a 1960s experiment not entirely dissimilar to Guttman and Maclay’s – might be forgiven for detecting shades of ‘Red and Blue Abstract’ in his account.

“I closed my eyes. ‘I see stars!’ I then burst out, finding the firmament spread out on the inside of my eyelids. The room about me receded into a tunnel of oblivion as I vanished into another world, fruitless to describe…The heavens above me, a night sky spangled with eyes of flame, dissolve into the most overpowering array of colours I have ever seen or imagined; many of the colours are entirely new – areas of the spectrum which I seem to have hitherto overlooked.”⁴

‘Red and Blue Abstract’ is by an anonymous artist, but another participant in the mescaline experiments, Basil Beaumont, wrote to Dr Guttmann in 1936 that his “appreciation of beauty, particularly flowers; is still enhanced greatly” and that his “painting is becoming more brilliant in colour”. Another of Guttman’s correspondents, a medical colleague, drew attention to a far less welcome by-product of the experiments:

“I hope you will not feel that I am interfering in writing to you, but I wonder if you know what sort of an experience taking mescaline can be in some cases? Have you taken it yourself? … In the case of the younger man [to whom you gave mescaline last Friday] it was an experience so hideous that no human being ought to undergo it without the very gravest necessity.  No one would go into it voluntarily if he had the slightest notion what it was going to be like; also in his case, it might have had disastrous consequences.  … I must tell you that but for luck, in that I happened to see him and detain him, I firmly believe he would have murdered his friend that night in a state of hallucination and I think also that if he not been under observation at the Maudsley he might at one point… have committed suicide.”

Sacks’ chapter on drug-induced hallucinations, in which he describes visionary experiences – in turn elevating and terrifying – that resulted from his own habitual drug use in the 1960s and 70s, makes for equally unsettling reading, and invites as much wonder concerning the abandon shown by previous generations of researchers as ‘Red and Blue Abstract’ does concerning the vision of the artist.

¹ W. Maclay and E. Guttmann, ‘Mescaline Hallucinations in Artists’, Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, vol. 45, no 1 (1941).

² Raymond Tallis, ‘Oliver Sacks on Drugs’, The Times Literary Supplement, 13 February 2013.

³ Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (Picador, 2012), p. xiii.

⁴ ibid, p. 99.