Life can be stressful in Kolkata – the crowds, the poverty, the heat, the constant cacophony of car-horns. And that’s just for me, a pampered western tourist. So how do the locals cope? More to the point, to what extent … Continue reading
Last week I was at a panel on mental health in India, at a conference in Goa organized by UCL. The speaker – Ratnaboli Ray, who runs a mental health NGO called Anjali in West Bengal – asked for anyone in … Continue reading
Dr Chris Millard is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions. His PhD explored the history of attempted suicide as a cry for help, and he is now researching the history of … Continue reading
Dr Åsa Jansson recently completed her PhD at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. Her thesis mapped the re-conceptualisation of melancholia as a modern biomedical mental disease in Victorian medicine. In this blog … Continue reading
Pain is a sensation – and a topic – that has recently attracted much attention among historians, particularly those working in the field of the history of emotions. This post interrogates perceptions of mental pain that link this feeling to … Continue reading
I’ve had quite a few conversations with colleagues about the challenges and rewards of archival research. We’ve talked about the joy of discovering a letter or memo or perhaps a collection of photographs barely touched for decades, as well as … Continue reading
Sarah Chaney is a PhD student at the UCL Centre for the History of Psychological Disciplines and co-organiser of the Damaging the Body seminar series. This post, about food, physical restraint, and Victorian psychiatric treatment, arises from one element of her PhD … Continue reading
What is melancholia? In Danish writer and director Lars von Trier’s latest film Melancholia, it is a planet. The planet is, perhaps, in turn a metaphor for melancholia. Which brings us no closer to an answer. The film has been … Continue reading