The Psychiatric Archives: An Opportunity to Grasp the Patient’s Experience (in Belgium during the inter-war years)
This paper presents an exploratory reflection on the question of individual experience by patients in psychiatric institutions, in its historical dimension. Are such experiences comprehensible through an analysis of the archives originating in the hospital? This reflection forms part of a study concerning the circumstances in which women were placed in psychiatric institutions, in Belgium during interwar period (1918-1940); its ultimate objective is to come to an understanding of the social, individual and familial situations that lead to a decision to intern a woman in a closed psychiatric institution. Here, the concept of experience is used to ascertain whether a different understanding of psychiatry is viable, that is to say, to understand it as a personal life-story and as a social fact. Could we, by dint of the psychiatric archives produced by medical institutions, go beyond institutional and medical issues, so as to understand how those placed in a psychiatric institution lived through their mental illness? The objective of this article is also to prepare several methodological markers with respect to issues of interpretation, of individual experience and of emotion. This article is not so much a summing-up of the results of research conducted in psychiatric archives, but rather a deliberation on the historian’s approach and appropriate course of action on the question of first-hand experience in psychiatry.