John Meyer ward – hospital stories in film Khaldoon Ahmed, Psychiatrist, anthropologist and filmmaker. ELFT NHS In this panel I will present reflections on making the film 'John Meyer Ward. I am a psychiatrist and filmmaker. In 2018 I interviewed people who connected to the former Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit at Springfield Hospital. It was closed down after a health care assistant was tragically murdered by one of the patients.
I interviewed former patients, family of patients, and doctors and nurses who worked there.
These interviews formed the basis of a documentary film 'John Meyer Ward' that was shown at community events and installed at the Bethlam Hospital's Museum of the Mind.
My intention as a filmmaker was to convey memories that were buried – perhaps due to their painful nature. John Meyer Ward was built as part of the Victorian Springfield Asylum. It was demolished to make way for a new wards on the same site. It held disturbed and unwell patients, but there was a culture of camaraderie amongst the staff. For one of the patients, it was a place of healing. However, for the mother of one of the patients who died, the feelings were mixed and complex.
The film was a collaborative process in many respects. Firstly, in the sharing of the stories.
The team assembled to collect these stories included volunteers like medical students. The staff or relatives who participated valued the opportunity to revisit and communicate events of 10-15 years ago. Making this film also revealed, almost like a Pandora's box, unprocessed institutional trauma. The ward was shut down due to the murder of a member of staff. This defining event had not been revisited, when there clearly was a need for it. In the panel I will also discuss issues of my position as both a psychiatrist and filmmaker.
>>https://www.ohs.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Final-OHS-Making-Histories-Together-Abstracts.pdf<<
_________
ASYLUM ARCHITECTURE: Psychiatrist and filmmaker Dr Khaldoon Ahmed talks about the construction of asylums in the 19th century, in light of the current redevelopment of Springfield Hospital. Hear about the architecture of the building, and how it is representative of attitudes towards mental health at the time. Tooting Library, free, book ahead, 6pm-7.30pm
>>https://londonist.com/london/things-to-do/things-to-do-today-in-london-tuesday-16-july-2019<<
____________
_
Khaldoon Ahmed London, UK Memoir I live in London and work as a psychiatrist. I combine my medical career with creative non-fiction filmmaking and occasional writing. At the moment I'm making a film about an abandoned Victorian psychiatric asylum that is being demolished. I just spent an incredibly enriching year living in Mexico City, and return to Under the Volcano for the third time.
>>https://underthevolcano.org/team/khaldoon-ahmed/<<
____________
Asylum – Stories from the John Meyer Ward
An online screening of the short film John Meyer Ward followed by a discussion between psychiatrist, anthropologist and filmmaker Khaldoon Ahmed and writer and director Tina Gharavi.
Psychiatrist and filmmaker Khaldoon Ahmed retrieves the memories of the last doctors, nurses and patients of John Meyer Ward. This poetic film takes us into the emotional architecture of confinement and psychosis. In the midst of a place of turmoil and disturbance, we find camaraderie and sometimes kindness. The building was originally part of Springfield Asylum, built 1841, and demolished in 2018.
John Meyer was the first resident physician of Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, built in 1841. He was killed by a patient, and a psychiatric ward was named after him – the John Meyer Ward. This building was demolished in 2018. The psychiatric asylums of Britain were emptied of patients in the 1960s. They are now knocked down or converted into luxury apartments. This film is an assemblage of images, recalling the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and the sculptures of Rachel Whiteread. John Meyer Ward functioned as a psychiatric intensive care unit until it was shut down when a patient killed a member of staff. This poetic film conveys the complexity of how as a society we manage, treat, and sometimes fail the most disturbed. Past patients, nurses and psychiatrists recall what John Meyer Ward meant to them.
____________
Speakers Dr Khaldoon Ahmed is a consultant psychiatrist, anthropologist and filmmaker. He was born in London of Pakistani descent. Khaldoon studied medicine at University College London after which he trained at the London Film Academy. He works in inner city London for the NHS. Through his work, he became sensitised to people marginal to society because of exclusion or experience of mental illness. He was a Trustee of the Mental Fight Club, an arts and health charity, that launched the Dragon Cafe and ReCreate Psychiatry projects. Khaldoon teaches medical students, and supervises trainees in psychiatry and psychotherapy. He has published research in culture and health.
Tina Gharavi is a BAFTA and Sundance-nominated writer/director, focused on delivering authentic stories lensed with an impeccably wrought perspective. She was born in Tehran. Having worked in war zones and in guerrilla filmmaking, Gharavi marries her indomitable spirit with a distinct talent to deliver performances and beautifully observed stories. Her debut feature, I Am Nasrine, was nominated for a BAFTA and she is set to direct her third feature, Night & Day, a Virginia Woolf adaptation in 2024. Now a showrunner, Gharavi's also engaged in development on her first TV series, Refurinn/The Fox, an Icelandic detective noir with an intriguing twist, exec produced by Nomadic Pictures (Fargo). She recently completed directing her first Netflix series, 4 episodes shot in Morocco: a hybrid drama-doc series, African Queens: Cleopatra, for Westbrook, exec produced by Jada Pickett-Smith. Gharavi is also an academic, teaching filmmaking around the world, and was awarded an MIT Fellowship. She was elected to the BAFTA Academy in 2017, is represented by Independent Talent in the UK and Gersh in Los Angeles, her two home bases. In her spare time, Tina dreams of becoming a beekeeper in Iran.
>>https://www.freud.org.uk/event/asylum-stories-from-the-john-meyer-ward/<<
____________
__
Bedlam, chaos and the fight to make Psychiatry truthful… Posted on October 6, 2016 by Knitting Time: art and poetry on life and mental health black and white image of a male psychiatrist administering electric shock treatment via an old fashioned box with valves Electro-shock. Woodcut © Colin Hambrook The 'Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond' exhibition at Wellcome Collection in London contains an assortment of historical documentation, ideas and artwork. Highlights from the archives are an incredible photographic portrait by Henry Hering of Richard Dadd at his easel in1857. What's so fascinating is not the contrived 'out to lunch' expression on the artists' face but the detail of the painting Contradiction: Oberon and Titania that he's working on in the photo. It gives an insight into Dadd's working process, planning and building up the canvas, contriving detail from the bottom left-hand upwards in an incredibly methodical fashion. Adolf Wolfli's 'Mental Asylum Band-Copse, 1910' is also worth seeing close at hand for it's stylized perspective and intense colour-range.
Bedlam is a text-heavy exhibition, which tries to do too much, and becomes somewhat overbearing as a result. In giving a flavor of the history of mental hospitals, the attitudes and the treatment of people both within the asylums of old and within contemporary mental health service provision the curation attempts too broad a remit – as John O'Donoghue mentioned in his review on DAO.
However it contains some gems. I loved the Madlove Designer Asylum exhibit, having followed the project since the vacuum cleaner's inception of an idea to re-imagine what good mental health looks, feels and tastes like in the series of workshops he's undertaken with Hannah Hull. First experienced at Unlimited Festival in 2014, it's remarkable to see how the project has developed, giving people the opportunity to imaginatively explore responses to how we would want to be treated and what we would need in order to cope during times of distress.
The brightly coloured Madlove 3D architectural installation imagines a dream-like place incorporating key elements from 2 years of research. The little touch of providing pencil and paper for people to make a record of their own responses to positive mental health was a nice reminder of how good mental health is everyone's responsibility.
I would also recommend Core Arts 'Our Voices' contribution – a series of audio testimonies – easy to miss in the exhibition space itself as there is so much to see, read and listen to. But the pieces give mental health system survivors the opportunity to tell their stories and add a touch of humour and pathos to the exhibition. Frank Bangay's poem 'Those Shuffling Feet From The Past' imagines the ghosts of incarcerated people haunting the blocks of luxury flats that many Victorian asylums have been converted into. It's a very powerful recording… The exhibition contained an important reminder from the past for me personally. Abandoned Goods recalls the art studio at Netherne Hospital in Surrey where I volunteered on a few occasions as a disturbed teenager looking for answers as to the veracity of Psychiatry back in the 1970s. I'd experienced – albeit second hand – some of the worst excesses of psychiatric torture (otherwise known as treatment) and I wanted proof of how to refute the science of psychiatry and the reasoning behind using punishment as 'cure'.
One of the installations: Pia Borg & Edward Lawrenson's 'Abandoned Goods' is a 35 minute film, which blends archive footage and includes first hand testimony from several artist/ patients during the 1970s. Edward Adamson set the studio up in1946 when art replaced photography as a diagnostic tool. When the chief psychiatrist Eric Cunningham Dax left the institution in 1951, Adamson upped his commitment increasing the number of art studios and providing the opportunity to be creative without pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo to underpin or to qualify the budget for art materials. Something in the region of 200,000 artworks were created up until Adamson retired in1981. The film documents the struggle to preserve and archive the artworks left to dereliction after the institution closed in 1994. Today around 5,500 pieces survive.
As far as my memory of the art studio serves, during the few visits I made as a volunteer, I don't recall anyone who saw themselves as an artist. There is incredible footage of Maria Popova speaking eloquently about her exquisite paintings on stone and flint from the hospital grounds. She talks about herself as an artist – but one who 'could do better'. It's heart-wrenching stuff that speaks volumes about a psychological struggle to gain self-esteem in an environment that denies it.
I helped out with tidying and chatting to people – but what left the biggest impression was the terrible health conditions of the longstay patients having been subjected to decades of abusive treatments. (Only psychiatry could turn the two words 'long', 'stay' into one word, 'longstay'.) Abandoned Goods documents psychiatry's obsession with disabling people. The film recalls American psychiatrist Henry Cotton's introduction of 'treatments' given to inmates during the 1930s – 50s. Based on the idea of 'sepsis' as a cause of psychosis, hospital staff set about removing as many bits of the human body that it could whilst still keeping people alive. Teeth, tonsils, kidneys everything… even spleens, colons, ovaries, anything that could be removed was removed in the delusion that to do so would 'cure'! I recall the toothless, wrecks of human beings that were the dregs of the aftermath of Victorian 'charity'. The lie that their physical deterioration was the result of 'mental illness' not the torture they'd been subjected to fuels my anger at Psychiatry to this day.
My day at Bedlam ended with a powerful evening event hosted by Wellcome. Mental Fight Club founded in East London by Sarah Wheeler in 2007 has given birth to RE:Create Psychiatry – a well-choreographed series of provocations by artists and health professionals. Seth Hunter and Dr Khaldoon Ahmed invited a series of 5 minute testimonies, which were then discussed by service-users, carers and care professionals.
The process allows contentious and divisive debate between psychiatrist and service-user to happen in a way that is productive for both parties. Artist/ performer Ellie Stamp introducing the idea of 'psychiatry: an ethos of 'being with', but a practice of 'doing to''. She talked about her experience of the incredible power imbalance that exists and the binary mindset of the medical profession. She talked about wanting to live in a world where "neuro-diversity is accepted and valued as necessary." Ellie's presentation then gave room for a response from Dr Lauren Gavaghan, talking about how as doctors 'doing to' is a necessary and important part of medical training. If you have a cancerous growth that needs removing or a broken bone that needs mending, you don't want your doctor asking how it feels or what your experience of being a patient is. You want them to act and to be able to make decisions with confidence built up through years of accumulating knowledge.
Doctors specialise in Psychiatric practice, having already completed their medical training. Lauren spoke about how the move from clinical practice doesn't involve training on 'being with'… of listening to the actual experience of the patient or responding human to human.
So, it struck me there is a disconnect there – a point early on in training at which the medical model over-rides any impulse to value the patient as the person who possibly has the expert knowledge of the condition they are living with. Often, instant life or death decisions are demanded of the mental health worker / psychiatrist, which involve taking action, sometimes against the individual's immediate wishes. There are no easy solutions as to how to support someone through their mental health issues, but the medical profession is based on principles of observation and documentation, not listening or certainly, within psychiatry, of believing what the patient has to say, at all.
What was especially brilliant here was how well thought through and considered was the template for provocations between mental health professionals and service-users.
Psychiatry needs some 're-creation'. The dependence on disabling medications just makes more people… more, well… dependent. These are the kinds of conversations that need to happen more…
>>https://colinhambrook.wordpress.com/2016/10/06/bedlam-chaos-and-the-fight-to-make-psychiatry-truthful/<<
____________
NOT by Khaldoon Ahmed - but interesting re "Shell-shock"
Elaine Showalter and 'the feminisation of madness'
Posted on November 11, 2016 by Knitting Time: art and poetry on life and mental health As part of researching literary references to lived experience of psychiatric hospital I recently re-read Elaine Showalter's The Female Malady. My research is chiefly concerned with looking at the social construct of 'madness' through the eyes of writers giving accounts of just how society defines sanity and insanity. We have this idea that mental illness is a scientific given, when the reality is that Psychiatry is as much a Science as Humoral Theory – originally associated with Hippocrates – could be regarded a Science.
Both Psychiatric diagnoses and medicine based on the four humours rely on subjective categorisations of an individuals temperament. And it is the context within which an individual is observed and judged that determines whether or not a person is deemed sane or insane. Yet habitually we talk about someone being clinically 'mentally ill' as if the Science that determines insanity is a given.
Compulsive Steps: Dream of Life Compulsive Steps: Dream of Life Showalter gives a rigorous account of how through the medicalisation of madness in the 19th century 'mental illness' came to be deemed as chiefly a woman's prognosis, primarily used as a form of social control – a way for men to keep women in their place. She gives a detailed account of how with the advent of the First World War – when so many men were returning from the Front in states of distress – that males were first associated with 'mental illness'. Even then, the 'illness' was categorised as 'shell shock' rather than 'hysteria' or labels associated with the feminine: "Built on an ideology of absolute and natural differences between women and men, English psychiatry found its categories undermined by the evidence of male war neurosis." The names for psychiatric diagnoses are as much in flux as the pre-determinants. According to Charles Myers an English physician who wrote the first paper on shell shock in 1915: "'shellshock' won out over 'anxiety neurosis', 'war strain' or 'soldier's heart'." [Female Malady p.167] The fickle world of the alienist has always been in a state of reinvention. Myers had inherited his definitions from the attitudes of Victorian psychiatrists who more clearly defined insanity as a moral issue – and, as such, saw 'madness' as a female malady… with female sexuality at its' root.
Showalter writes: "The regulation of Women's Cycles in Victorian psychiatry often seems like an effort to postpone or extirpate female sexuality. Dr Edward Tilt argued menstruation was so destructive to the female brain that it should not be hastened but rather be retarded as long as possible and he advised mothers to prevent menarche by ensuring that their teenage daughter's remained in the nursery, took cold shower baths, avoided feather beds and novels, eliminated meat from their diets and wore drawers. Delayed menstruation he insisted was "the principal cause of the pre-eminence of English women, in vigour of constitution, soundness of judgement, and rectitude of moral principle." On the Preservation of the Health of Women at the Critical Periods of Life. p. 31" [The Female Malady p. 75] Showalter goes on to describe the treatments invented by male psychiatrists for their female patients: "W. Tyler Smith for example recommended injections of ice water into the rectum, the introduction of ice inside vagina and leeching of the labia and the cervix. "The suddenness with which leeches applied to this part, fill themselves," he wrote admiringly "considerably increases the good effects of their application and for some hours after their removal there is an oozing of blood from the leech bites." The most extreme and nightmarish effort to manage women's minds by regulating their bodies evolved out of beliefs expounded by the Obstetrical Society of London that masturbation was the singular cause of madness and led to Dr Isaac Baker Brown's surgical practice of clitoridectomy as a cure for female insanity… Brown carried out his sexual surgery in his private clinic in London for 7 years between 1859 and 1866. In the 1860s he went beyond clitoridectomy to the removal of the labia as he became more confident he operated on patients as young as 10, and even on women with eye problems. He operated on women whose madness consisted of their wish to take advantage of the New Divorce Act of 1857 and found in each case that his patient returned humbly to her husband.
In 1867 Brown was expelled from the Obstetrical Society not so much because his colleagues disagreed with his methods, but because patients had complained of being tricked and coerced into the treatment. Some had been threatened that if they refused to have surgery their condition would worsen and they would become hopelessly insane.
The decision for expulsion came after a speech by Dr Seymour Haden, secretary of the society giving a forceful if intentional description of the sexual power relationships in Victorian medicine.
We have constituted ourselves as it were the Guardians of their [women's] interests and in many cases… the custodians of their honour. We are in fact the stronger and they the weaker. They are obliged to believe all that we tell them. They are not in a position to dispute anything we say to them, and we therefore may be said to have them at our mercy… Under these circumstances if we should depart from the strictest principles of honour, if we should cheat or victimize them in any shape or way we would be unworthy of the profession of which we are members." Obstetrical Society Meeting, British Medical Journal 1867, p.396.
[The Female Malady p.75-p.78] Psychiatric practices have changed enormously since those dark days of torture and meticulously argued subjugation of women, body and soul. Showalter remarks on the changes in power relations that began to emerge towards the end of the 19th century: "At the same time that new opportunities for self-cultivation and self fulfilment in education and work were offered to women, doctors warned them that pursuit of such opportunities would lead to sickness, sterility and race suicide. They explicitly linked the epidemic of nervous disorders – anorexia nervosa, hysteria and neurasthenia – which marked the fin de siecle to women's ambition." [The Female Malady p.121] Providing a detailed feminist critique of a range of novels from the mid-1800s onwards, reflecting understanding of the 'mad', Showalter alights on Janet Frame's autobiographical novel Faces in the Water, citing it as one of three novels, published at the beginning of the 1960's, which marked a new precedent in attitude: "While earlier novels did not question the idea that madness was the woman's own fault, these novels [including Jennifer Dawson's The HaHaHa and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar] place the blame for women's schizophrenic breakdowns on the limited and oppressive roles offered to women in modern society, and deal very specifically with institutionalisation and shock treatment as metaphors for the social control of women. [The Female Malady p.213] The parallel between schizophrenia as a social construct and female identity runs through Faces in the Water. It is intrinsic to Frame's poetic evocation of the rites of passage endured by a teenager at the hands of psychiatry, located in a mental hospital in Christchurch, New Zealand in the 1950's.
Electric Shock Treatment is at its height, deemed the new wonder cure at the forefront of what Frame jokingly calls 'The New Attitude'. Frame knows she is caught in a spiders web of cruel judgements and desperately at every twist and turn seeks resolution and an attempt to hold on to her sanity, in the face of punishment dressed up as cure. Written with a razor-sharp sense of irony Faces in the Water conveys the atmosphere, the smell of urine and defeat, the taste and feel of the 1950s asylum. Her Cliffhaven and Treecroft could be located in the UK or the US. With the advent of Chlorpromazine – the first of the chemical interventions introduced globally in 1951, Electro Convulsive Therapy and leucotomy – there was a new optimism about the treatment of the 'mad'.
The Victorian asylums were being modernised bringing in clean showcase wards that contrasted distinctly with the long stay ward and the secure unit. My memories of Banstead, Belmont and Netherne where I volunteered briefly were of oppressive institutions dedicated to disabling people 'for their own good' – another theme repeated in Frame's recollections. Decisions were made about peoples' lives – transferred from ward to ward and from hospital to hospital, without any sense of responsibility for letting the person know what the consequences of a transfer was likely to be.
It seems everything was done to ensure any transition was done to produce as much anxiety as possible. Frame recalls her anxieties over threats of ECT and leucotomy… she recalls promises of release and steps towards release from hospital that disappeared into thin air.
In my own experience I was taken alone into my bedroom by my mum's psychiatrist aged ten and was guilt-tripped into telling him a long list of things she had been saying and to whom, so that he could get his 'proof' of her insanity. I was taken in to see her after she'd been given large doses of ECT and she couldn't remember who her children were. The impact of what I'd done felt like falling through the centre of the earth. And yet I was meant to believe that her memory-loss was the result of her 'mental illness' not systematic torture.
The history of Psychiatry reveals a history of reinvention with new labels, and new freedoms at every turn of the wheel. It is only with hindsight that we look back at these developments as new forms of oppression. Frame recalls this in Faces in the Water through bitter experience.
Back to the top of this page . . .