Before Depression
1660 - 1800

The People

Professor Allan Ingram | Dr Clark Lawlor | Professor Stuart Sim | Professor Richard Terry
Dr Leigh Wetherall-Dickson | Diane Buie | Pauline Morris

Professor Allan Ingram (Director)

Allan has worked for many years on issues concerning mental health in eighteenth-century writing, and particularly on the paradoxes and dilemmas of expressing the experience of insanity within a period where diagnosis and treatment could be both strict and random. His book, The Madhouse of Language: Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge 1991) examined these problems in the context of the social understanding of language, both the language of the medical world and the language of the so-called insane. More recently he has published (with Michelle Faubert) Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth-Century Writing: Representing the Insane (Palgrave 2005), which looks at literary and visual representation of madness, or rather its misrepresentation as part of a sane cultural or literary agenda. He has also edited two collections of primary source material: Voices of Madness: Four Pamphlets, 1683-1796 (Sutton 1997), which consists of four first-hand accounts of the experience of being diagnosed as insane, and Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader (Liverpool University Press, 1998), which attempts to reflect the dialogue, or lack of it, between writing by patients, or sufferers, and writing by medical practitioners. His first book, based on his PhD thesis, was Boswell's Creative Gloom: A Study of Imagery and Melancholy in the Writings of James Boswell (Macmillan 1981), which discusses the paradox, recently explored by Stephen Fry in his television programmes on Bipolar Disorder, which links depression and creativity. Allan has spoken widely in Europe and North America on aspects of his research.