115 - Music, Health and Wellbeing: learning from Nineteenth-Century Britain (Resubmission)
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My research has shown the important role music played in nineteenth-century long-stay psychiatric hospitals. Band, choirs, chamber music and visiting performers all played a role in promoting music as an effective, and efficient, means of benefiting patient wellbeing. This project will find new ways of collaborating with practitioners in the creative arts, health and heritage sectors, to engage new stakeholders in historical research, to influence practice in the present day, and to focus future historical work in this area. It will result in exhibitions, interactive events and digital resources that engage new audiences with the nineteenth-century history of psychiatry and music, and prompt new conversations about the role of music in health and wellbeing.
Projects focus on two outcomes: 1) the potential for historical research to offer new perspectives and opportunities for present-day practice in psychiatry and mental health; 2) the value of engagement with heritage and the arts for mental health service users.
The project builds on work already undertaken to develop links between historians and practitioners as part of the AHRC-funded network ‘Psychiatry and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ (PAN/ https://fass.open.ac.uk/research/projects/PAN), in a series of symposia culminating in a conference (June 2024). Key collaborators in this network are the Crichton Trust, and the Bethlem Museum of the Mind. The project will develop these, and other, relationships to ensure a broad engagement with the histories of music and psychiatry, ensuring diverse voices and collaboration with local communities.
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