The following is the text of a keynote speech given by Mark Brown to the Design in Mental Health conference at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham on 16th May 2018
‘The institution’ looms large over the history of mental health,” said then Conservative health minister, and later racist pin-up, Enoch Powell in 1961 in his famous ‘Water Towers’ speech: “There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside — the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity.”
I didn’t think I’d ever be quoting the words of arch racist Enoch Powell to a room full of people in the Midlands. I didn’t think that they’d still be relevant. But there you go. Life comes at you fast.
What Powell was saying, in the speech that I wish was his most famous rather than the deplorable racist one that keeps coming back into the public eye like a turd surfacing in a swimming pool was this: the institutions we build around mental health seem to be eternal. Built of bricks and mortar and concrete they become a proxy for our thoughts about those whom society finds most troubling and challenging. The buildings in which we ‘treat’ those who are unwell seem eternal, like mountains or valleys. They’ve been there forever, they’re never going to change. The impossibility of change gets in our bones. Mental health inpatient care has that ’immense solidity’; we might be able to change it a bit, but, the realists say, its always going to be with us like racism or structural inequality.
[For more on this story by Mark Brown, go to https://medium.com/@MarkOneinF...-better-c99b2ef6d778]
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