Oral Histories

In the period from June 2020 to February 2021 the project team collected seventeen oral histories from former nurses, social workers and carers who remembered the transition from the mental hospitals to care in the community in the 1990s. Due to COVID-19, the oral histories were collected remotely. The project team was unable to reach out to mental health service users as day centres have been closed since the beginning of the pandemic. Some oral histories with ex-patients who experienced the transition from the mental hospitals to care in the community in Nottingham are available here, which is part of a pre-pandemic doctoral project by Dr Verusca Calabria.

The audio and written oral history extracts from former nurses, social workers and carers, collected as part of the Hidden Memories project, span across a period of 30 years (from the 1960s to the 1990s). The testimonies offer unique insights about care practices in the shift away from institutional care to care in the community. The transcripts of the oral histories will be deposited at Nottingham Central Library in the autumn of 2021. Below you can access the audio-visual exhibition, organised in three main themes: care in the mental hospitals, the transition from the mental hospital to Community Care, and experiences of community care.

If are you a service user, carer or a former staff member who experienced the transition from asylum to community care in the 1990s in Nottingham, you can share your memories and/or photographs via this project’s blog. please get in touch. You can also follow the project on Twitter.