In July, Alex presented at the Life Histories in Mind Conference in Manchester. Here’s the title and abstract for his talk:

‘Mass Observation, Life Writing, and the End of Nerves’

This paper explores the value of the Mass Observation (MO) archive as a source for histories of mental health and illness grounded in everyday life. Established in Britain in 1937 and active until 1949, before being revived as the Mass Observation Project in 1981, MO is uniquely positioned to illuminate how understandings of mental health and illness are woven into the life histories of ‘ordinary’ people. Across both phases, the organisation has collected thousands of accounts of everyday life written by volunteer respondents over many decades. As historians and social scientists have increasingly recognised, the particular strength of this material lies in the opportunity for longitudinal analysis. MO allows researchers to follow individuals as they narrate, revise, and reinterpret their lives over time, offering rare insight into changing self-understandings and cultural scripts. Building on work by Andrew Burchell and Mathew Thomson, which frames MO as an invaluable ‘incidental’ archive for the social history of mental health, this paper argues that its life narratives open up new possibilities for writing histories from below that attend to life beyond the diagnosis. This paper will develop this argument through a comparative analysis of the writings of two women: one contributing to MO between 1939 and 1950, the other writing for the contemporary Mass Observation Project from the early 1980s onwards. Drawing on Carol Gillian’s Listening Guide method, the analysis will explore the narration and re-narration of mental health and illness over time. Rather than reinforcing a linear account of the ‘psychologisation of everyday life’, the paper traces the decline of ‘nerves’ as a dominant cultural framework for understanding mental ill-health, and its replacement by a more fragmented and ambiguous set of tropes and discourses. In doing so, it highlights the continued importance of life narratives for understanding the history of mental health.