Owen Davies, Sarah Wise and Louisa Treger

Social historians Professor Owen Davies and Professor Sarah Wise and novelist Louisa Treger discuss attitudes to mental health over the last two centuries and how they often led to scandalous cases of injustice.

How did the birth of psychiatry in the 19th century change how madness was understood and attitudes to those who believed in ghosts and the supernatural? Why were 50,000 people locked up by the British government following the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913? And how did one pioneering 19th-century woman journalist fake insanity to expose the horrors of the asylum?

Davies is author of Troubled by Faith: Insanity and the Supernatural in the Age of the Asylum, an exploration of the beliefs of 19th-century asylum patients, which explores the entanglement of science, faith and the supernatural world. He is professor of social history at the University of Hertfordshire and has written extensively on the history of magic, witchcraft, ghosts, religion, and popular medicine.

Wise is author of The Undesirables: The Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 and Its Assault on Liberty, which tells how 50,000 people were detained for life for being born out of wedlock, shoplifting, having a learning disorder or a chronic illness, or for simply being different. Wise is visiting professor at the University of California’s London Study Centre and her previous books include Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England.

Treger is author of the historical novel, Mad Woman, about the true story of a reporter, Nellie Bly, in 1880s New York, who faked insanity in order to expose the wretched conditions faced by patients in the city’s women’s lunatic asylum. Bly persuaded Joseph Pulitzer to run her stories in the New York World newspaper. She was a pioneer of investigative journalism.  Treger is also author of The Lodger and The Dragon Lady.

Discussions are chaired by broadcaster and author Matthew Stadlen.