Psychiatric institutions are agents of social control, but asserting that tells you little by itself. This offers inferences about hegemonic ideas of normality. While we can not presume people in psychiatric institutions were in fact ill, especially if their commitment was involuntary, in a great many cases their behavior was judged anomalous in some way, by somebody. They can lead the researcher beyond diagnosis and demographics into specifics about patient experience, of their treatment, of their symptoms not to mention their world and lives beyond the fact of being patients. Q: What can patient records bring to the history of psychiatry?

We hope that they act as a catalyst for further discussion in the field. We present our thoughts as a conversation, structured around questions we have posed for ourselves, and building on discussions we have had together over the past few years. One of the most common questions we get asked as historians of psychiatry is “do you have access to patient records?” Why are people so fascinated with the psychiatric patient record? Do people assume they are or should be available? Does access to the patient record actually tell us anything new about the history of psychiatry? And if we did have them, what can, or should we do with them? In the push to both decolonize and personalize the history of psychiatry, as well as make some kind of account or reparation for past mistakes, how can we proceed in an ethical manner that respects the privacy of people in the past who never imagined their intensely personal psychiatric encounter as subject for future historians? In this paper, we want to think through some of the issues that we deal with as white historians of psychiatry especially at the intersection of privacy, ethics, and racism.

Just enough research by erika hall