Earlier this year, the Bethlem Museum of the Mind opened at the world’s oldest psychiatric institution, the Bethlem Royal Hospital at Beckenham, south London.
The museum’s collection has been on display at the hospital for 40 years, but its £4m Heritage Lottery Fund redevelopment was an opportunity to re-think the displays and the stories they told.
Consultation with people who have experienced mental health issues first hand and medical staff was central to the museum’s approach.
“We have a rich mental health collection and as a working hospital we also have contemporary references, which meant we could consult with service users and staff as well as going out to the community,” says Victoria Northwood, the head of Bethlem Museum of the Mind.
“We didn’t want to be a mouthpiece for the NHS – we had to represent different voices.”
For this reason, a chronological history of the hospital was ruled out. Northwood says the danger was presenting past medical practices as “bad” and today’s as “good.”
Instead the exhibition designers opted for a series of themes and included contemporary responses to objects.
For example, a recreation of a padded cell is accompanied by an account from a woman who had been in and out of mental health facilities her whole life and had been detained in one.
Working with sensitive material – and vulnerable members of the community – did throw up some challenges.
“One area that was the most difficult was around constraints,” says Northwood. “But we pre-empted this, and did quite a lot of focused work around these objects and how people might respond to them.”
The museum challenges mental health stigmas from the word go, with a statement displayed in the entrance stating that one in four British adults will experience mental health problems in any given year.
Because many of its visitors are hospital service users, the space has been designed to be as inclusive as possible, with quiet seated areas where people can get away from the exhibits if they need to. Tables and chairs in the foyer invite visitors to spend time in the space.
“The consultants we worked with asked people questions about colours and other sensory information that might cause problems, but the results were contradictory,” Northwood says.
“One thing that we didn’t anticipate, but I’ve been struck by, is the visitors book – it is just a sketch book, but we’ve found that people are using it to share their stories, send messages of hope and advice to others, and draw pictures. It shows this is a space they feel safe in.”
The museum only had three months to carry out its consultation, and Northwood says ideally it would have had longer to go out to the community. However, even with a longer timeframe there are restrictions to consultation.
“To some extent the people who get involved are the ones who want to be involved,” she says. “What’s missing [from the museum] are voices from people who are really hostile toward mental health services, but I’m not sure how we could have reached them.”
Co-production
In Wakefield, the Mental Health Museum has also been working closely with people with mental health issues. The aim is to interpret and display a collection that spans the history of mental health care from the early 19th century to the present day.
The museum is run by South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and is based at Fieldhead Hospital, which provides a number of services including; therapy and psychology services; forensic services; and learning disability assessment and treatment services.
Before 2011 the museum could only be accessed by doctors and students. However, the trust realised that the collection could be used to break down barriers and reduce stigma about mental health conditions.
The process of redeveloping the museum has been slow with co-production at the heart of its approach. “We started with baby steps,” says Cara Sutherland, the museum’s curator. “First of all we worked with hospital staff, because we had no experience of working directly with service users and we wanted to draw on their expertise rather than try to reinvent the rule book.
“But this was hard because it was during the recession and a time of cuts, and they wanted to know why frontline staff positions were being lost yet the hospital was paying for museum workers.”
Once staff realised how the museum could support their daily work, Sutherland and the team started to engage with service users.
“We brought groups into the museum, and took items from the collection to the wards,” she says. “The challenge with what we could take with us, as we had to be sure that the objects couldn’t be used to cause physical harm.”
Another consideration was the emotive nature of the collection, and the risk that the process of engaging could be potentially detrimental as well as cathartic.
“We did choose to take risks – we decided that there shouldn’t be anything that we wouldn’t put on display. It was about making sure that we have professionals on hand to try to understand why people reacted to certain objects and how they might be able to use that reaction to overcome their fears,” Sutherland says.
“Anyone can have a reaction to an object; that’s the point of tackling stigma around mental health, you can’t hide behind doors.”
The museum reopened two years ago, and aims to educate visitors about mental health and act as an icebreaker for conversations about contemporary and historical treatments.
Like Bethlem, some areas of the exhibitions posed a challenge, and the views of the service users were fundamental in helping the curatorial team and designers deal with this. For example, historical restraints are juxtaposed with drugs, which patients felt were the modern-day equivalent.
“One difficulty is that we present mental health from a western cultural perspective, and we find visitors from other cultures find some of the displays problematic,” Sutherland says. “And a lot of the stories we tell are from the male perspective – women are hidden from history generally, especially women with mental health issues.”
It hopes to work with different community and women’s groups to address the gaps in the displays.
For many museums working with people with mental health issues on exhibitions, privacy is a big issue. The faces of patients are shown in the Mental Health Museum, and some people have their names attached, although they are able to remove these at any point.
“It’s about being honest from the word go,” Sutherland says. “We want to make people feel comfortable that they could help someone else’s recovery or journey.”
The museum’s collection has been on display at the hospital for 40 years, but its £4m Heritage Lottery Fund redevelopment was an opportunity to re-think the displays and the stories they told.
Consultation with people who have experienced mental health issues first hand and medical staff was central to the museum’s approach.
“We have a rich mental health collection and as a working hospital we also have contemporary references, which meant we could consult with service users and staff as well as going out to the community,” says Victoria Northwood, the head of Bethlem Museum of the Mind.
“We didn’t want to be a mouthpiece for the NHS – we had to represent different voices.”
For this reason, a chronological history of the hospital was ruled out. Northwood says the danger was presenting past medical practices as “bad” and today’s as “good.”
Instead the exhibition designers opted for a series of themes and included contemporary responses to objects.
For example, a recreation of a padded cell is accompanied by an account from a woman who had been in and out of mental health facilities her whole life and had been detained in one.
Working with sensitive material – and vulnerable members of the community – did throw up some challenges.
“One area that was the most difficult was around constraints,” says Northwood. “But we pre-empted this, and did quite a lot of focused work around these objects and how people might respond to them.”
The museum challenges mental health stigmas from the word go, with a statement displayed in the entrance stating that one in four British adults will experience mental health problems in any given year.
Because many of its visitors are hospital service users, the space has been designed to be as inclusive as possible, with quiet seated areas where people can get away from the exhibits if they need to. Tables and chairs in the foyer invite visitors to spend time in the space.
“The consultants we worked with asked people questions about colours and other sensory information that might cause problems, but the results were contradictory,” Northwood says.
“One thing that we didn’t anticipate, but I’ve been struck by, is the visitors book – it is just a sketch book, but we’ve found that people are using it to share their stories, send messages of hope and advice to others, and draw pictures. It shows this is a space they feel safe in.”
The museum only had three months to carry out its consultation, and Northwood says ideally it would have had longer to go out to the community. However, even with a longer timeframe there are restrictions to consultation.
“To some extent the people who get involved are the ones who want to be involved,” she says. “What’s missing [from the museum] are voices from people who are really hostile toward mental health services, but I’m not sure how we could have reached them.”
Co-production
In Wakefield, the Mental Health Museum has also been working closely with people with mental health issues. The aim is to interpret and display a collection that spans the history of mental health care from the early 19th century to the present day.
The museum is run by South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and is based at Fieldhead Hospital, which provides a number of services including; therapy and psychology services; forensic services; and learning disability assessment and treatment services.
Before 2011 the museum could only be accessed by doctors and students. However, the trust realised that the collection could be used to break down barriers and reduce stigma about mental health conditions.
The process of redeveloping the museum has been slow with co-production at the heart of its approach. “We started with baby steps,” says Cara Sutherland, the museum’s curator. “First of all we worked with hospital staff, because we had no experience of working directly with service users and we wanted to draw on their expertise rather than try to reinvent the rule book.
“But this was hard because it was during the recession and a time of cuts, and they wanted to know why frontline staff positions were being lost yet the hospital was paying for museum workers.”
Once staff realised how the museum could support their daily work, Sutherland and the team started to engage with service users.
“We brought groups into the museum, and took items from the collection to the wards,” she says. “The challenge with what we could take with us, as we had to be sure that the objects couldn’t be used to cause physical harm.”
Another consideration was the emotive nature of the collection, and the risk that the process of engaging could be potentially detrimental as well as cathartic.
“We did choose to take risks – we decided that there shouldn’t be anything that we wouldn’t put on display. It was about making sure that we have professionals on hand to try to understand why people reacted to certain objects and how they might be able to use that reaction to overcome their fears,” Sutherland says.
“Anyone can have a reaction to an object; that’s the point of tackling stigma around mental health, you can’t hide behind doors.”
The museum reopened two years ago, and aims to educate visitors about mental health and act as an icebreaker for conversations about contemporary and historical treatments.
Like Bethlem, some areas of the exhibitions posed a challenge, and the views of the service users were fundamental in helping the curatorial team and designers deal with this. For example, historical restraints are juxtaposed with drugs, which patients felt were the modern-day equivalent.
“One difficulty is that we present mental health from a western cultural perspective, and we find visitors from other cultures find some of the displays problematic,” Sutherland says. “And a lot of the stories we tell are from the male perspective – women are hidden from history generally, especially women with mental health issues.”
It hopes to work with different community and women’s groups to address the gaps in the displays.
For many museums working with people with mental health issues on exhibitions, privacy is a big issue. The faces of patients are shown in the Mental Health Museum, and some people have their names attached, although they are able to remove these at any point.
“It’s about being honest from the word go,” Sutherland says. “We want to make people feel comfortable that they could help someone else’s recovery or journey.”