Stories of Silence, Echoes of Events: The Family as a Changing Site of Illness

Abstract

Today, citizens in many western countries are increasingly confronted with questions of mental health. In the mid-twentieth century, mental issues were not a subject commonly debated in public. Rather, the shame connected to so-called nervous diseases caused many families to conceal the mental distress of a family member. Drawing on and unpacking three oral history interviews, this chapter explores how the family as an institution has formed a changing site of illness. Following ecological approaches to mental suffering, it more specifically shows how the changing dynamics of secrecy and disclosure within families have shaped and determined how mental illness has been experienced. In doing so, the chapter offers a novel lens on how secrecy, as a kind of knowledge management, has intersected with broader societal and cultural developments and shaped the situated and historically contingent experiences of mental suffering.

Introduction

In the autumn of 1953, Clara’s funeral in the small Danish province of Holbæk was held in absolute silence. Her late husband, Carl, saw no need to “gather a crowd participating more or less out of a sense of duty,” and since the ceremony was followed by her cremation, he declined to have any flowers at the funeral. He also requested the pastor, a good friend of the family, not to speak about Clara, as he did not consider that “the church is the place to talk about people—how often are eulogies not an offense—there are better things to talk about.”¹

Why this hushed atmosphere? The enforced silence at Clara’s funeral is echoed in thirteen oral history interviews I conducted in 2019, all revolving around the topic of family secrecy in relation to mental illness.² The interviews revealed that, due to the shame and taboo surrounding mental afflictions in mid-twentieth-century Denmark, causes of death have been concealed and lives erased through the deliberate exclusion of mentally ill relatives from family narratives. Secrecy, the stories disclosed, has served to safeguard family reputations and to shield individual family members from stigmatization.

In this chapter, I explore the entanglements of family secrecy and changing experiences of mental illness from the mid-twentieth century onward. Recently, scholars have unraveled the social aspects of secrecy and shown how family secrets change over time in accordance with shifting norms and values.³ It has been shown how family secrets not only implicate the specific family members involved, but also have long-term effects on later generations.⁴ As a form of “slow violence,” the hidden skeletons of the past can have damaging consequences for a family’s descendants.⁵ My aim here is to link these social and temporal aspects of family secrecy to arrive at a more contextual understanding of experiences of mental afflictions. Employing an ecological approach to mental illness, I argue that secrecy and knowledge practices in domestic life form part of the culturally contingent context—or “ecological niche”—that constitute the situated and yet collectively shaped experiences of mental suffering.⁶

Since the end of the twentieth century, the concept of ecology has flourished across academic disciplines and beyond. The term is used in many ways and in many different contexts, including in discussions of mental health.⁷ A common element in emerging ecological approaches to mental illness is the attempt to transcend the bifurcations between the body and mind and between the biological and the social, which, as historian Edward Shorter remarks, has haunted the discipline of psychiatry from the very beginning.⁸ The ecological and phenomenological inspired theories all conceive of mental illness as an embodied, contextualized, and narrated experience.⁹ Without questioning individual suffering as real, these perspectives imply a shift of focus from the individual to the afflicted person’s interdependency with the close environmental and social surroundings. Taken together, the ecological approaches can be seen as a reaction to the neuroscientific turn in psychiatric practice, or what Shorter has characterized as the second wave of biological psychiatry from the 1970s onward.¹⁰ Building on these perspectives—and acknowledging that mental illness is a fundamentally inter-relational phenomenon constituted by a multitude of elements—it is worth probing further how also subtle kinds of knowledge management, namely the changing dynamics of secrecy and exposure in the mundane practices of family life, have shaped the historically variated experiences of mental illness.

Even though families have been deeply involved in most experiences of mental suffering, the history of psychiatry has had a strong tradition of focusing either on ideological, institutional, and medical developments or on the demarcations of deviance and relations of power between doctors and patients.¹¹ The so-called “patient turn” in the medical humanities shifted the analytical lens to lived experiences of institutionalization.¹² Yet, it was not until recently that a focus on the family in the history of mental illness came to the fore.¹³ These studies show how on the one hand families have been affected by the experience of mental illness of one of their members, and on the other hand, how families have helped shape experiences of mental illness themselves.

Building on and contributing to this line of micro-historical research, I approach “the family” as a genuinely historical phenomenon. As an institution, the family is partly conditioned by larger structural patterns and cultural norms, but it is also a situated microcosm in which contradictory and ambivalent dynamics of protection and repression co-exist. As sociologist David H. J. Morgan concludes in his work Re-Thinking Family Practices (2011), there is no such thing as “the Family.” Families are, he states, “constantly undergoing change, whether we are talking about families in general located in historical time or any individual family moving through that time.”¹⁴ Moreover, Morgan draws attention to what he defines as “the fluidity” of family practices and argues that a focus on family practices must include ways of linking the emotional dimension of family living to other dimensions and “a much wider and larger set of complex social practices.”¹⁵ Following Morgan, every family is affected by situated events and coincidences as well as by broader (shared) societal circumstances. Pushing this argument further, I wish to foreground how families are not only done differently across time and place, but how they also do differently: Families inevitably create and form the context with which they are intertwined.

However, gaining insights into previous knowledge practices in the intimate sphere of the family poses a methodological challenge. Facing this challenge, I employ the method of oral history. As an alternative to the first-hand accounts of the afflicted found in most oral histories in this field, I examine the relatives’ memories of how the knowledge management of a mentally ill family member was conducted in the everyday life of the past. This point of view, I argue, allows for insights into the inter-relational experience of mental illness and the material and affective impacts of silence and secrecy in the past, including from a cross-generational perspective. In some cases, I interviewed more family members and was able to supplement their oral histories with written sources. Doing so enabled me to discern how secrecy related to mental illness has been experienced differently by individual family members, and this combination of sources also strengthened the oral testimonies and nuanced my understanding of how mental illnesses have been concealed.¹⁶

Following the post-positivistic approach to memory and subjectivity,¹⁷ the recorded life histories provide more than autobiographical information.¹⁸ Oral history accounts should, as Tumblety has argued, be considered as both a source and a subject.¹⁹ This means that such stories tell us as much about the present as about the past. On the one hand, the recorded family narratives include detailed information on actions, knowledge practices, and experiences related to mental illness in the past. On the other hand, the memories of silence and concealment are also shaped and colored by the informant’s current social context. The accounts of secrecy must be measured against new norms and new modes of communication. Today, a whole new medical vocabulary of mental illnesses has been developed, and although being mentally ill is still stigmatized, diagnoses are commonly shared in our everyday lives. This, importantly, might be part of the explanation why previous silences are now, in hindsight, conceived more as intentional acts of secrecy.

As Maurice Halbwachs has framed it, family memory is a typically intergenerational kind of collective memory,²⁰ but, as Astrid Erll has pointed out, family memory is also always a “re-creation and a dynamic, context-dependent construction that can change considerably over time as well as according to different settings and audiences.”²¹ Moreover, family memories might, as Claudia Lenz has suggested, oscillate between personal, autobiographical remembering on the one hand and public remembrance and official images of history on the other.²² Hence, the stories also testify to how the relatives interpret their family memories considering the present and how their interpretations of secrecy in the past have come to impact their current lives.

Below, I will unfold and analyze three of the thirteen life histories to demonstrate how shifting dynamics of secrecy and disclosure within families have shaped the historically specific experiences of mental illness down the decades. I have chosen to concentrate on these three histories, convinced that a more detailed in-depth analysis most clearly conveys how secrecy and silence become co-constitutive of the situated—and yet collectively formed—experiences of mental suffering. The stories of Clara, Thomas and his daughter Edith, and Richardt all supplement each other by illustrating from different angles how secrecy became defining for the experience of illness, both for the afflicted and their relatives. The following recollections illustrate the ambiguities embedded in family secrecy and show how both the perception and the effects of secrecy change over time and thus alter experiences of mental illness in fundamental ways.

Secrecy as a Negotiator of Mental and Somatic Health

In September 2018, Adam told me the story of his mother Clara—or rather, his memories and the limited information about his mother he had been able to collect since she disappeared from his life at the age of eleven. He recalls his own first experience of something being wrong. Late one night in October 1951, his mother came back from a visit to some friends. She was crying and locked herself up in his father’s office. Both his parents were in there for a long time, and Adam “could sense that something was wrong.” The next day, when he returned from school, he saw an ambulance, and he knew right away that it had to do with his mother. The ambulance stopped briefly so that he could say goodbye, and then it left for the hospital. He was told that his mother was sick, but what she was suffering from was not revealed. Around Christmas the same year, he and his siblings were allowed to visit her once at Holbæk Hospital. It was the first time he had seen his mother since the ambulance had taken her away, and it was also to be the last time he ever saw her:

She was so well, she had been out to buy me a little red car, which, by the way, I still have out here, and yes, then she was gone—until she died in November 1953, that is two years after—and I hadn’t visited her, and I hadn’t known what happened, besides that she was somehow feeling bad.

As Adam recalls it, his father frequently visited his mother at the mental institution she was transferred to from Holbæk Hospital after her second brain hemorrhage a few months later, approximately every weekend. However, he never talked about those visits with the children at home. As Adam remembers it, he actually never mentioned her name again. “We repressed it, my sister and I; we buried our mother’s memory.”

Clara had four children: Paul, Kristine, Adam, and Gerda. As I found out through surviving written sources, the situation was slightly different for the two older siblings. In the memoirs of Adam’s older sister, Kristine, written in 2009, she describes how she and her older brother were allowed to visit their mother once she was in the mental institution.²³ As Kristine remembers it, Clara was very pleased about this visit, although for the children the experience was far from pleasant:

When she had been institutionalized for a while and, I guess, had become quite calm, Paul and I were allowed to visit her. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. We were alone up there, and she was lying in a big ward with lots of other patients and was restrained with straps. She was very happy to see us, but she had difficulties speaking and expressing herself. I cried most of the time, as I am now. Maybe we tried to tell her a little about what we were doing, I can’t remember.

Reading Kristine’s memoirs, I also discovered more details about Clara’s condition and the process of her hospitalization. After the first brain hemorrhage, she was admitted to Holbæk Hospital, where her eldest daughter could visit her frequently. The hospital was close to the high school Kristine had just started attending. Kristine describes these visits as “cozy.” They would go for short walks, and her mother definitely got better. Then the second brain hemorrhage happened, and she got worse. She was briefly transferred to the mental institution at Nykjøbing Sjælland before being admitted to the central hospital in the capital, Copenhagen, where she was operated on. After the surgery, her capacities were further limited, and the hospital staff could not do anything to help her condition. However, her blood pressure had stabilized, so the doctors advised that she be transferred to a nursing home. Yet, for some reason, probably both financial and emotional, their father decided to convince the doctors that they should transfer her back to the mental institution in the north of Denmark. As Kristine concludes: “Nothing could really be done, and she was signed up for a place in a nursing home. That was more than my father could handle, and instead she was re-admitted to the mental institution at Nykjøbing Sjælland.”²⁴ This well-considered decision is confirmed in a letter Kristine’s father wrote to his son-in-law after the funeral:

The doctors were of the opinion that she was cured in so far as her blood pressure had stabilized. They would have preferred to send her to a nursing home, but I convinced them to keep her under the good conditions in the hospital [the mental institution], and luckily Dr Jacobsen [the doctor at the mental institution], who had been outstanding and supportive, agreed.

In Kristine’s memoirs, the conditions at the mental institution—in contrast to how her father depicted them—are described as being far from good or right for her mother. Rather, Kristine seems convinced that the experience had marked her mother negatively and had worsened her state of mind: “I think it must have been a terrible experience for her. I have read some of the letters she wrote to dad. She missed him and us a lot, and she also tried to jump out of the window.”

Clara was clearly affected by her brain hemorrhage, which changed her behavior significantly. However, she was capable of writing letters, in which she mentioned her children and expressed how much she missed her family and longed for her home. Her faith in God played a major role in these letters, and she prayed for strength and for the possibility to see her husband. Adam also comments on the frequent references to God when he shows me the letters, as if this convinces him of her insanity.

Clara’s case shows how blurred is the boundary between mental illness and somatic disease and how it may be negotiated in relation to emotional and perhaps also financial circumstances. Clara’s story also illustrates how maintaining secrecy about her transcends the discursive level. Her husband’s more or less conscious desire to conceal her condition from the rest of the family’s everyday environment implied her physical removal and admission to somewhere where she was cut off from her children and their wider social relations. The fact that Clara ended her life in a mental institution and not a nursing home became defining of her illness, but it also affected the way she was remembered and talked/not talked about not only historically but also in her children’s future lives. As Adam reasons:

Basically, she had gone insane. And it’s something I wasn’t told before I had grown up. I didn’t know anything about it, and it was a very difficult time for us. I had difficulties in school, but it was suppressed, it was never mentioned […] no one ever mentioned anything about it to me, no one in the family ever spoke about it, no one spoke about it. So, there was something for me to deal with there.

The secrecy thus contributes to the children associating mental illness with something shameful, something that should be kept under wraps, an idea they carry with them into their future lives as a kind of embodied silence, as a form of “slow violence.”²⁵ Adam does not blame his father for the silence, just as he does not question his mother’s removal and admission to the mental hospital, even though he is convinced that it has been traumatizing for her as well as for him. The children did not question their father’s conduct; instead, the unquestioned secrecy contributed to their own self-stigmatization.²⁶

Adam explains and legitimizes his father’s actions with reference to the substantial age difference between his parents (26 years) and the fact that his father was brought up in a different period, when one did not talk about emotions:

But when you imagine, he was born in 1881, and his father again in 1843, it was such an old family with old traditions, so back then they did not speak about emotions at all. So, you can’t blame them, because they hadn’t learned.

Another explanation for their father’s silence and conduct in the early 1950s might be the common practice at the time to institutionalize women who did not conform to social norms.²⁷ An additional explanation for the silence surrounding Clara’s condition could be the fact that children were not included in conversations in the same manner as they are today. In the 1950s, family hierarchies and the focus on children and their rights were different, and the norms of emotional communication between children and adults have changed significantly.²⁸ This shift may also have contributed to Adam’s and his siblings’ increasing awareness of, and confrontation with, the secrecies of the past. Finally, their father’s silence and the “non-mentioning” of their missing mother can also be interpreted as an attempt to protect his children from unpleasantness. In the end, it does not have to be an either/or situation, as acts of secrecy can be motivated by conflicting and sometimes contradictory emotions and be suppressive and protective all at once.

Whatever the explanation for the father’s silence, the secrecy around Clara became an inseparable part of her “mental illness” in the past as well as in the present. The family’s secrecy, maintained mainly by her husband, became co-defining for her classification as “mentally ill.” In the case of Clara, the secrecy included her physical removal and re-admission to the mental institution, despite it being in opposition to the doctors’ recommendations. Thus, the secrecy constituted an essential component in the ecological niche of her illness, making it “mental” instead of “somatic.” Moreover, even after her death, it influenced the way she was remembered by her children. Adam and his siblings embodied and perpetuated the secrecy for many years. Not until 2009 did his sister Kristine write down her memories of her mother, emphasizing Clara’s liveliness before the illness, as a way to compensate for the many years of silence:

Not only was Mother fond of parties and sociability she also loved visiting other people. […] Mother had something with hats. I remember mainly her “trouble-hat”—a fine dark blue straw hat, its crown resembled a pill box, and the shadow it cast was monumental. […] Mother was completely unsnobbish—talked with everyone and was not afraid of voicing her opinion.²⁹

Silence and Domestic Isolation

While Clara was removed from her home, her children, and her familiar social surroundings, several other stories convey how isolation and exclusion within the four walls of the home have been part of being mentally ill. Wilhelm recollects how his childhood in the early 1950s was marked by frequently unexplained disappearances by his father, Thomas, who was hidden away in a room upstairs:

In our childhood we often experienced that my father simply […] in the morning, then it was just mom. Father wasn’t there. And a week could pass […] fourteen days, I actually don’t quite remember how long […] we ate alone, mother took care of everything, got us to school and that sort of thing, kept up our good spirits, it was quite hectic, I think, now, when I look back at it, everything had to run while she also had to take care of the store, so she was awfully busy, and then […] one fine day, then father was downstairs again. Handled the shop and everything. Everything went back to normal.

This description shows how concealing the mental illness of a family member does not afflict one person alone: the secrecy affects the whole family, creating a different atmosphere in the home and changing everyday routines. The “active non-knowing”³⁰ around the father’s absence is, in this situation, enhanced by busy and hectic acts, and it becomes clear how the experience of mental illness is partially constituted by the silence that is enforced in a particular environment, an unarticulated absence that reconfigures the social situation and—at least for a while—the relationships within the family. This situation also shows how mental illness is a fundamentally inter-relational phenomenon. According to ecological perspectives on mental illness, the changed environment cannot be seen separately from the illness itself.³¹ Just as the family is affected by Thomas’s absence, his mental state inevitably takes shape and responds to the changes in his surroundings. The silence and the changed location, isolated in a room on the second floor, became part of his illness.

In addition to these regular and unarticulated withdrawals from family life, on one occasion Wilhelm’s father, Thomas, was hospitalized in a mental institution quite far away. Wilhelm remembers that an older woman took care of them, while his mother must have made very long journeys by bike from one end of the country to the other to visit him in the early 1950s. The children did not visit him at the hospital, and they did not talk about him while he was gone. Then he returned; suddenly he was back again. These frequent disappearances continued, mainly in the spring and autumn, as Wilhelm recalls.

The experience of mental illness was a reality that marked and was marked by more than one generation in Wilhelm’s family. Besides the story of his father, the fate of his twin sister Edith serves as another illustration of how secrecy contributed to the situated experience of mental illness through physical isolation within the four walls of the home. In addition, the story of his sister also shows how gendered family practices have triggered and marked experiences of mental illness. The gendered aspect of mental illness is a research field in its own right. Both historically and to the present day, the number of women suffering from mental afflictions far exceeds that of men.³²

Indeed, Edith’s life path was radically different from her twin brother’s. In his narrative, Wilhelm reflects on how a different upbringing in the home and the limitations of women’s educational possibilities in the 1950s might both have contributed to his sister’s mental affliction: “Then I had a twin-sister, fifteen minutes older than I, Edith, a fresh, lively, gifted girl—she really was. I actually think she was smarter than me, but well […] then came the time when our parents had to figure out what their children should do.” Wilhelm further explains how his oldest brother was to inherit the family farm from an unmarried uncle. Wilhelm himself was fond of books and was the only one to be sent to high school. He remembers his parents discussing whether his intelligent twin sister should be allowed to follow him, but as it was not that common for girls in the 1950s to continue their education, they ended up choosing a different path for her:

I know mom and dad discussed whether Edith, my twin sister, should follow me and stay in school. But then dad reasoned, well, you know, it will probably turn out the same way for her as for every other girl, they get married, they have children, and all that […] so he really did not think there was any purpose in letting her continue her education. So, when she was fourteen years old, after seventh grade, she was sent out to serve in households. On different farms. And there she did not thrive.

Edith could not really adjust to life in the houses where she was a servant. She was sent to a lot of different places and ended up in a religious hostel in the town of Aabenraa, where she had her first serious breakdown. The hostel called her parents and asked them to come and pick her up. Since Wilhelm had a driving license and his parents couldn’t really leave their work, they sent him to bring her home. “I’ll never forget it, because […] she was […] absolutely gone, unrecognizable, she was talking complete nonsense, and I’d never experienced that before—it was a shock to me.”

Their parents then kept Edith at home, and they really did not know what to do with her. Wilhelm remembers how they discussed the situation with a couple of friends in town, both priests. They advised against having her admitted or contacting the public psychiatry unit. Wilhelm’s parents also belonged to the religious community, and he recalls that they were rather skeptical of psychiatrists. According to Wilhelm, they were afraid that the psychiatrists would start digging into the family’s religious convictions and draw the following conclusion:

When she is from such a home, then it must be caused by some kind of religious trauma, right? And they didn’t think it was. And I don’t think it was either. But they were convinced that the psychiatrist would come to that conclusion immediately.

So, the family confined her at home until she got better, as she did. It took some time, but step by step, she got back on her feet. Unlike her father, Edith was not isolated in a room in the house, but she remained isolated at home from the outside world. Wilhelm was her primary carer, and he recalls her passivity, spending several months in their living room: “There she lay on our couch, and I held her freezing hands.”

After she recovered, Edith wanted to become a secretary. She moved to the larger town of Kolding, where she passed all her exams except one. She could not handle the pressure and stayed away and then fell into a depression once again. Now it was the 1960s, she was medicated, and the strategy of secrecy changed. Edith was no longer isolated at home:

Realizing that her depressions were occurring frequently, something more had to happen apart from just letting the time pass and wait for her recovery, right? Well, yes […] she was on medication for the rest of her life, lithium it was. And I do think the doctors were too lax in kee** a check on her in the way that […] she was just prescribed the medicine and then, click, it was just automated.

The late 1950s marked an important shift in the public’s understanding of mental illness. Due to the development of psychopharmacological drugs, the history of psychiatry now entered what has been characterized as the second biological wave.³³ The influence of the bio-medical model of psychiatry, with its reliance on drugs and somatic treatments, in some ways helped destigmatize mental illness from the 1950s onwards.³⁴ The “ecological niche,” including the modes of communication around such illnesses, changed significantly.

Following the ecological approaches to mental suffering, Thomas’ and Edith’s physical and social isolation should be considered an inseparable part of their illnesses. As living beings, they constitute their experienced worlds through their ongoing interactions and embodied engagement with their environments. Their being hidden away in a protected room or in the home more generally influenced how they experienced their mental illness and, not least, how it was experienced and passed on by their close relatives.

Wilhelm’s family narrative thus shows how secrecy and silence shaped the socio-material environment of mental illness for both his father and his sister. Moreover, the story shows how co** with mental illness in this family in the early 1950s was marked by religious belief and skepticism of the merits of psychiatric practice. This was a period before the invention and widespread use of psychopharmacological drugs in Denmark and comparable European and North American countries, and his family had little confidence in medical or therapeutic treatment. Furthermore, Wilhelm and Edith’s parents wanted to prevent the authorities from questioning or inquiring into the family’s religious values. In the 1960s, the strategy regarding Edith’s suffering changed. Secrecy did not dominate anymore.

Secrecy and the Power of Religion

Religious conviction played a significant role in the silencing and concealment of mental illness in several of the life histories I collected. The story of Richardt serves as another example of how a religious family tried to keep a mental illness under wraps. The story also indicates how the same religious environment could have triggered the mental distress in the first place. Moreover, the narrative illustrates how secrecy itself is negotiated and interpreted differently by different family members.

In 1980, Richardt took his own life while staying at a large mental hospital in central Denmark, hanging himself with a robe in the bathroom. He was 42 years old. At the time, his daughter, Lisa, was 16 years old. However, she was not able to discover the details of her father’s death until she was 30. For years, Lisa was very angry at her mother for not telling her the whole truth about her father’s death right away. As she recalls it, the information was very indirect and sparse:

I found out because […] his new wife called and, by coincidence, I picked up the phone in the house, where I now lived with my mom and her new husband. His wife said: “Lisa, I have to talk to your mother.” I thought it was strange, and I wondered if he had perhaps been hospitalized again? I knew he was admitted occasionally. Then I went down in my room […] no into my room […] I lived on the first floor at this time, and then I could hear my mother whisper far too loudly to her husband: “Richardt has taken his own life,” in a hysterical voice. And it was […] she couldn’t even tell it to me!

Today, however, Lisa and her mother Annabeth get along well, and Lisa suggests that I also talk to her mother to get the details of Richardt’s story from more than one perspective. I agree and get in touch with 82-year-old Annabeth. It turns out that she has a slightly different version of the same event:

Well, Lisa was in the house, it was the day we returned from holiday. Birgit [the father’s new wife] knew when we came home, and then she called and told me that Richardt had taken his own life […] And I was […] well it was terrible, right? And Lisa, she had a room in the basement and […] [long pause] and she came, she could sense that something horrible had happened, because I started to scream out loud, and Herman was holding me, and it was just too much for her. She thought I should have come to her first. And talked with her about it. But it was a tragedy, right?

These two divergent testimonies, including uncertainties about the location of Lisa’s room, remind us of the unreliability of memory.³⁵ Yet, throughout the long conversations I had with both Lisa and Annabeth, it became evident that the family secrecy around Richardt’s mental illness extended far beyond the disagreement between the two of them about the communication of his death. This secrecy was mainly built on a misunderstanding. Annabeth was told that Richardt had taken his own life, but she was not told how. Lisa thought her mother kept that information from her, but her mother said she did not discover the details about Richardt’s death until many years later at a family gathering. At this event, according to Annabeth, an uncle, who was married to one of Richardt’s sisters, suddenly referred to Richardt having hanged himself. Through the interviews, it became obvious that it was primarily Richardt’s religious family, mainly his two sisters, who concealed both his mental illness and the details about his death.³⁶

Richardt was raised in a family that belonged to a certain religious movement in Denmark called the “Inner Mission.” His father developed Parkinson’s disease and was in a wheelchair for most of Richardt’s childhood, so the family was run by his mother and, for the most part, his two older sisters. At the age of 16, Richardt stood up in the church and made a scene. He was clearly attempting to break with his family’s religious belief, but this inappropriate outburst led to his admission to the mental hospital in Risskov. According to Annabeth’s recollections, no one in the family mentioned Richardt’s admission to hospital or his mental illness to her before they married. Only after Lisa’s birth did Annabeth discover that something was severely wrong. Richardt started acting in a psychotic manner and was admitted to the mental institution once again.

Annabeth visited him frequently, accompanied by their small daughter, Lisa. However, Richardt and Annabeth’s relationship did not survive the struggle, and they divorced when Lisa was three years old. Both later remarried. Richardt’s new wife, Birgit, was part of the hippie movement, and she did not recognize his mental illness as a disease needing therapeutic or medical treatment. At this point in time, the influence of the anti-psychiatric movement in Denmark was strong, and it clearly affected Birgit’s attitude towards medical treatment.³⁷ According to both Lisa and Annabeth, Richardt then experienced some very turbulent years. At home, he and his new wife Birgit experimented with open relationships and drugs. When his mental condition was so severe that an admission to the institution in Risskov was unavoidable, he received LSD and electric shock treatment. Finally, he committed suicide.

After this tragic event, it was not just the cause of his death that was kept under wraps. Lisa and Annabeth were not invited to Richardt’s funeral, nor were they informed about the time or place. Everything was taken care of by Richardt’s two sisters. However, Lisa and Annabeth did have a closer relationship with Richardt’s mother, Lisa’s grandmother. Through her, they kept in touch with Richardt’s relatives, and by and by, they also got on better terms with his sisters. When one of his sisters died, they were invited to her funeral. On this occasion, Lisa experienced yet another act of unpleasant secrecy. She realized that Richardt’s existence had been erased from the family narrative:

I attended his sister’s funeral; she’d got very old, I guess it was ten years ago. Then there was this very religious group of people. And the priest, he holds a speech, and he says: “Oh, it was such a lovely family, the “Petersons,” living in this nice home at Stillingsvej in Aarhus. They had these two lovely girls, Elsa and Greta. It was such a warm house, and everyone was welcome,” and so on and so on […] and my father wasn’t mentioned with even a word!

This experience was clearly very uncomfortable for Lisa. There she was, participating in the funeral, but no one knew who she was. Lisa’s and Annabeth’s accounts both claim that Richardt’s religious family played a major role in kee** Richardt’s mental condition a secret.

The recollection of Richardt’s life through Lisa’s and Annabeth’s memories shows how secrecy is never stable but always negotiated, including between the individual family members. What has for many years been thought of as a secret can easily turn out to be a misunderstanding caused by a lack of communication or by different perspectives on the same situation. Moreover, the story also shows how religious conviction, as in the previous story, has motivated the maintenance of secrecy, reinforcing the stigmatization of mental suffering. Yet, whereas Thomas and Edith were isolated within the religious family to avoid suspicion from the outside, Richardt was excluded from the religious environment and erased from the family narrative.

This pinpoints the diversity and situatedness of family secrecy practices. Families marked by religious structures and beliefs have also operated differently and engaged in different modes of concealment. Richardt’s story shows how different imaginaries of mental illness impacted on his life and his experience of mental distress: the religious, the medical, and the anti-psychiatric paradigms all shaped and constituted his mental suffering. In addition to these different knowledge regimes, the particular secrecy practices carried out by Richardt’s family were an inseparable part of his illness with respect not only to his own experience but also to the way his illness has been perceived and narrated by his close relatives.

Conclusion

This chapter has shown how kee** secrets works as a social practice that restructures the emotional environments of the family and thus shapes the historically contingent experiences of mental suffering. As my analysis has demonstrated, the time-bound modes of communication have had both private and public impacts. On the one hand, the dynamics of secrecy and disclosure have marked the way mental illnesses have been experienced by the afflicted. On the other hand, family secrecy practices have also created and reinforced a narrative on mental suffering that, through embodied silences and the work of memory, has been carried across generations. Oral history interviews offer unique insights into the intimate sphere of the family and have proved a valuable tool in arriving at knowledge practices of the past that would otherwise be left unspoken. Moreover, the testimonies made it possible to scrutinize and foreground the inter-relational aspects of mental suffering and to trace how ambiguous practices of secrecy, silence, and “active non-knowing” have had an intergenerational influence.

Religion played a significant role in several of the collected life histories. Not only did religious environments encourage secrecy, as in the case of Edith, where neighbors in the community warned against collaboration with the public psychiatric system, or in the case of Richardt, where the sisters kept their brother’s funeral confidential and excluded his existence from the family narrative. The testimonies from the relatives also suggest that religious belief could have triggered the mental affliction in the first place or caused a deterioration. Edith’s breakdown happened while she was serving at a religious hostel, and Richardt’s first meltdown occurred at church, indicating a reaction toward the demands of the fundamentalist religious movement. In mid-twentieth century Denmark, whether religion should be considered a contributor or exacerbator of suffering, religious conviction definitely shaped both the atmosphere and the secrecy practices of domestic life and hence marked the way mental illness was experienced.

Family secrecy, as a kind of knowledge practice, will always mediate between collective norms in the public sphere and intimate matters in the space of the family.³⁸ Secrecy is formed by societal structures, but it also forms them. Furthermore, secrecy becomes “real” in respect of its consequences—that is, the effects it has on bodies and lives in the past as well as in the present. Depending on the moment, silence and speech can, as Sara Ahmed has formulated it, “have different even contradictory effects […] which is a question not simply of their time, but also of the place in which we reside at a given moment of time, the worlds we find ourselves in.”³⁹ To put it differently, secrecy can be simultaneously oppressive and protective, depending on the context, the perspective, and the specific situation.

While my focus has been on secrecy, I hope this chapter will also serve to foreground the socio-material aspects of mental suffering, thus contributing to an increasing awareness and re-articulation of the fact that questions of mental health are not to be dealt with solely within the medical paradigm. In the past as well as in the present day, the family, as a historically changing site of struggle, plays an important role as a context of mental suffering. This comprehension might be especially important in “the post-asylum era,”⁴⁰ where families, as a consequence of the implementation of district psychiatry and the general trend towards de-institutionalization in several European countries, are given greater responsibility and are once again more directly involved in the caring process.⁴¹ In this situation, it is crucial to keep in mind how every family is also determined by the more invisible cultural structures of power that affect knowledge management in private life and thus shape experiences of illness.