The Nottingham Psychiatric Archive

The contents of the Archive are determined by the different stages of psychiatric research in Nottingham.

 

The first stage started with Dr Duncan Macmillan, a noted pioneer of “open” psychiatric hospitals (that is, - no locked wards) in the 1950s and 1960s. He did not publish very much in journals, but there are a number of government publications about the original psychiatric case-register that he produced with Miss Eileen Brooke of the Department of Health at the time. The archive also contains some personal reminiscences from people who knew him. Dr Ernest Gruenberg (USA, then of  the Millbank Memorial Fund, an American foundation that supports studies on population health) wrote a detailed account of his visit to Mapperley Hospital, which is of special interest.

 

 

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None of the investigators who have followed Dr Macmillan have done so with a conscious intent to keep any particular type of work going. These include Professor John Cooper, Professor Glynn Harrison, Professor Peter Jones, Professor Tom Arie, Dr Richard Turner and Dr (now Professor) Peter Tyrer.

 

Nevertheless, the number and variety of significant studies that have been done on the form and distribution of serious mental illness, together with the development of services needed for their treatment, is quite surprising. The bibliography section of the Archive is limited to these aspects of mental illness, and of the 380 items listed in the Archive, about 150 describe work carried out on the population of Nottingham.

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