Laura Yeoman
Access and Digital Engagement Archivist, Borthwick Institute for Archives
.jpg)
As the Access and Digital Engagement Archivist at the Borthwick, Laura takes the lead on the Institute's access responsibilities and finds ways to bring its audiences and collections together, both onsite and online.
Our 60 seconds interview with Laura:
What do you do in the field of mental health?
I care for mental health records from the 19th and early 20th centuries that are administrative notes and patient casebooks from York-based psychiatric hospitals known at the time as “lunatic asylums”.
What do you find most rewarding and inspiring in this work?
I think these records are a unique opportunity to uncover the stories of people in York from the past with mental health conditions who otherwise are not documented in formal archive collections such as baptism, marriage or burial records, and to capture the experiences of people who were not rich or literate and history would have forgotten them.
What is the most challenging or complicated aspect of this work?
Balancing the teaching needs and research opportunities with the data protection legislation and the ethical issues with the sensitive nature of these records.
What impact do you hope your work is having- or can potentially have?
I hope that we can get to a point that the records are more heavily used and that people have greater understanding that mental health conditions – like post-natal depression - are not new concepts but they have been around for centuries. Although the human experience is the same, we can do something about it today which we haven’t been able to do in the past.
Could you share with us one piece of advice that you follow for your own mental health?
Having balance and making the most of my time away from work and taking pleasure in little things, like chocolate. There was an advertising campaign by the York-based chocolate manufacturer, Rowntree’s, in the 1940s that coincided with women going into the workplace. The punchline was that for women who “lived on their nerves”, the answer was chocolate – not politically correct these days but a historical milestone!