Introduction

Memory is the connective tissue that makes lives meaningful. A connection to the past enables sense making in the present and renders possible futures as thinkable. In the case of traumatic or difficult pasts, this connection becomes intensely important. At personal, collective and national levels, past harms and injustices need to be made visible and subject to commemorative exploration in order for victims to ‘go on’ in the present. In this context, repair is usually considered to be a memorial work of putting the past in order to meet ongoing moral and epistemic demands (Margalit, 2002; Blustein, 2008; Campbell, 2014). Through this work it becomes possible to envisage a reconstruction or ‘healing’ of personal and social ecologies of thought and feeling.

This understanding of memorial work as repair is complicated by issues around mental health. For example, while some approaches to trauma (for example Johnstone and Boyle, 2018) emphasize the need to understand personal histories – ‘what happened to you’ – as a way of addressing current feelings and experiences – ‘what’s wrong with you’ – there is also a counter-discourse around the inherently unrepresentable nature of traumatic pasts (Caruth, 1996). Pain and suffering incurred through extraordinary and horrific violations of social and personal relations may be simply incomprehensible and hence difficult to both recollect and to narrate. Mental health issues may also call into question the reliability of memory. Victims – and in some cases perpetrators – may have their recollected experiences problematized or discounted (see Haaken and Reavey, 2010). They may also be accused of focusing unduly and unhelpfully upon the past rather than facing up to problems in the present. Here, repair can take the form of an injunction to disconnect from a difficult past in order to ‘move on’ with living.

In this chapter, we want to explore the tensions in memorial repair work around mental health. We will be concerned with the question of when and how the past comes to matter for persons managing severe and enduring mental health issues. Crucially, we look at the practices which are enacted to manage these tensions, and how they are collectively performed within an institutional setting. Our argument is informed by work we have conducted in a medium-secure forensic pathway in a large inpatient psychiatric unit.