Professor James Miller recently sat down with Matt Gergyek to discuss his research on the history of mental illness as well as his popular online course, HIST 3515O: Madness in Modern Times (not offered this year). A short excerpt of the article “Madness in Modern Times” is included below with the full article available online.
The history of mental illness is a dark and fragmented one.
“You can go to asylums in the United States and they’ve got graveyards” made up of “rows and rows of . . . these little white crosses and stones,” says Carleton Prof. James Miller, who teaches and researches the history of mental illness. “These people don’t even have names; you have no idea who they are.”
While the history of mental illness is tragic and brutal, Miller looks at it from an empathetic perspective to try to understand the individuals caught up in shifting understandings of the causes and treatments of madness over the centuries.
“It’s not just about the guy who invented the lobotomy, it’s about the people who underwent the lobotomy,” he says.
Miller first became interested in research and teaching about “mad studies” (the name comes from the mad pride movement – in some respects similar to the queer pride movement which involves “reclaiming the label and taking it back as a positive”) when he was introduced to the genre of “outsider art.”
Outsider art is artwork created by untaught artists, often only discovered and highlighted after their deaths. Artwork created by asylum patients is an especially popular form of outsider art.