Deinstitutionalization in the Netherlands: A Memory Project

This project focuses on people with mental health diagnoses in the Netherlands and that nation’s late shift from institutional to community provision in the 1980s. Using an innovative methodology developed over the last decade by researchers at the Madness Canada/ folie Canada website, the project will bring together oral history, art-craft memory work and research-participant reflections. Working in collaboration with Netherlands-based researchers/participants, we will gather detailed oral histories of former patients, their families and community mental health advocates. By supporting the creation of art-craft memory pieces by interviewees, the project will provide rich new interpretations of the period and further nuance how the policies and experience of the transition to community mental health were shaped by period and place. An unstructured post-project participant-researcher conversation will provide an opportunity to evaluate the validity and effectiveness of the project methodology in the field of health history.