Talking about Mental Illness: Life Histories and Mental Health in Modern Australia

Abstract

Mental illness was an experience readily discussed by participants in the Australian Generations Oral History Project. The stories demonstrate the significant shift which has occurred within the community during the last three decades, around attitudes toward, and treatment of, mental illness. The pervasiveness of a therapeutic discourse through which to express understandings of self is also evident. This article examines the different ways in which participants understood their varying experiences of mental illness. It considers participants’ changing historical circumstances and argues that we can identify key structural patterns of inequality—poverty and gender—which shape the prevalence and experience of mental illness, and the interpretive frames which provide narratives through which to understand that experience, namely feminism and the therapeutic attention to suffering. The article also considers the significance of the life history interview in enabling participants to tell their stories of mental illness within a whole of life trajectory.