James Dunk

The University of Sydney, School of Social and Political Sciences, Post-Doc

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Planetary health, mental health, Anthropocene, psychology, environmental history
Address: School of Social and Political Sciences
University of Sydney

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Panu Pihkala

University of Helsinki

Liza Jachens

Antje Disterheft

Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Geert E Smid

Utrecht University

Csilla Ágoston

Eötvös Loránd University

Magdalini Tsevreni

National Centre of Social research

Amber Vermeesch

Tseday Tilahun

Mahatma Gandhi University

Maxine van Bommel

Anglia Ruskin University

Anna Kelly

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Books by James Dunk

Healthhist.21.1.

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Bedlam at Botany Bay

Madness stalked the colony of New South Wales, and tracing its wild path changes the way we look ... more Madness stalked the colony of New South Wales, and tracing its wild path changes the way we look at our history. Bedlam at Botany Bay is a series of stories about what happened when people went mad in this place, told through the magnificent correspondence of tireless colonial secretaries, the cautious and brazen language of lawyers and judges and firebrand politicians, and by siblings, parents, friends, and the mad themselves. It is not a history of the miserable institutions built for the mad, or those within them, or the people in charge of them. These stories of madness are woven together into a narrative about freedom and possibilities, and collapse and unravelling. It is a new story of colonial Australia, cast as neither a grim and fatal shore nor an antipodean paradise, but a place where the full range of humanity wrestled with the challenges of colonisation. They were divorced from those held dear and from familiar environments, enjoyed spectacular freedoms, and laboured under the burden of their ambitions. They faced the bleakness of failure, the effects of their violence, and the strangeness of life amidst an exiled majority and the structures put in place to discipline them – surrounded by the clank of pickaxes and leg irons, the voices of the poor and uneducated, and the self-righteous chattering of those who ‘came free’.

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Papers by James Dunk

Climate Distress: A Review of Current Psychological Research and Practice

Sustainability

Environmental disasters will increase in frequency and severity due to disruptions to Earth syste... more Environmental disasters will increase in frequency and severity due to disruptions to Earth systems, including increased global mean temperatures, caused by human activity, and consequently our health care system will be burdened by ever-increasing rates of illness, mental and physical. Psychologists will need to respond to this pressure by ensuring they have the training, education and interventions to respond to climate-related distress, as well as realising the limits of the therapeutic approach. Climate psychology, a recent field of study integrating and advancing core expertise around climate distress, has become more prominent with the increasing urgency of climate change and emerging documentation of its impacts on mental health and wellbeing. The purpose of this scoping review is to survey the research being undertaken on climate distress, and to identify gaps in the existing literature with a view to shaping practice and informing future research. Younger people, notably, a...

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Admissions: Voices Within Mental Health ed. by David Stavanger, Radhiah Chowdhury and Mohammad Awad

Health and History

Eco-psychology: a critical paradigm in the climate emergency

Australian Psychologist

Planetary Health Histories: Toward New Ecologies of Epidemiology?

Isis

Psychology as if the whole earth mattered: Nuclear threat, environmental crisis, and the emergence of planetary psychology

History of Psychology, Dec 20, 2021

This article traces a genealogy for the various strands of contemporary psychology which are conc... more This article traces a genealogy for the various strands of contemporary psychology which are concerned with global environmental change, including conservation psychology, ecopsychology, and other subfields and interdisciplinary concentrations. Focusing on a network of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other researchers based at a research center founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1982, the article explores what those who first turned to the psychological causes and implications of climate change and other kinds of global environmental disruption had learned from their studies of nuclear-era psychology. The explorations of these researchers and practitioners in systems psychology, depth psychology, and political psychology, elicited by the first truly planetary crisis of the modern world, the threat of general nuclear war (which, apart from the enormous damage done at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and during weapons tests, remained largely theoretical), were applied to a new planetary crisis which was already unfolding: global environmental degradation. As they completed this pivot from the nuclear threat to the environmental crisis, at the end of the Cold War, using the language of the psychology of survival, these researchers displayed the form and function of what might be called a planetary psychology-of psychological theory and practice which broaches the planetary context of the individual psyche. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Bedlam at Botany Bay

Wrongful confinement and the spectre of colonial despotism: a political history of madness in New South Wales, 1843

History Australia

Greg EghigianThe Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health

Health and History, 2019

From the margins: madness and history in Australia

History Australia

The liability of madness and the commission of lunacy in New South Wales, 1805–12

History Australia

Abstract The penal colony of New South Wales occupied an uncertain place within the highly mobile... more Abstract The penal colony of New South Wales occupied an uncertain place within the highly mobile and volatile world of maritime trade. The incidence of maritime madness brought its peculiarities and vulnerabilities into view. This article examines three instances of madness between 1805 and 1812 to which the colony’s governors were forced to respond. Together they show the liabilities madness presented in such a place: the commercial liability faced by investors and merchants and sometimes shared by colonial governments; the liability to fragile colonial hierarchies presented by imposture; and the liability produced by imperfect legal procedure, which opened governments to charges of despotism in the context of personal liberty and private property, key elements of protective lunacy proceedings. The introduction of the commission of lunacy in 1812 was a response to heightened concerns over liberty and property following the 1808–09 rebellion in Sydney, and also demonstrated broader concerns about marginality, mobility and despotism.

Sounding the Alarm on Climate Change, 1989 and 2019

New England Journal of Medicine

Sounding the Alarm on Climate Change, 1989 and 2019 As the climate crisis continues to unfold, th... more

Human Health on an Ailing Planet — Historical Perspectives on Our Future

New England Journal of Medicine

Human Health on an Ailing Planet In the face of a climate crisis, bringing environmental ethics i... more

Work, paperwork and the imaginary Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum, 1846

Rethinking History

ABSTRACT Following the injunction of the field of paperwork to look at paper, rather than through... more ABSTRACT Following the injunction of the field of paperwork to look at paper, rather than through it for information, a close read of the first volumes of the New South Wales State Archives & Records series NRS 5031 discloses a surprising history. The New South Wales Legislative Council appointed a select committee in 1846 to enquire into the management of Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum – into its work. Finding the work in order, the committee quickly turned to its paperwork failures. The Legislative Council, created in 1843, worked tirelessly through the 1840s to establish control over the penal colony, anticipating self-government. Cited as an example of its humanitarian impulses and thorough committee work, the 1846 committee’s report shows parliamentarians embracing bureaucratic forms and medicine’s promise to cure madness. The absence of proper records was taken up by the committee and by the colonial press as a weapon; attacking the asylum officers, they attacked also the structure of colonial government and the likeness of irresponsible government in the colonies. NRS 5031, a series of casebooks filled out from 1847, helped to create the ‘imaginary’ lunatic asylum on paper which was demanded by these politics.

Authority and the Treatment of the Insane at Castle Hill Asylum, 1811–25

Health and History

The creation and deployment of authority was a dominant therapeutic instrument in the treatment o... more The creation and deployment of authority was a dominant therapeutic instrument in the treatment of insanity, both before and after the advent of moral therapy. This article explores the challenges in establishing authority at Castle Hill Lunatic Asylum, the first institution for treating insanity in colonial Australia. Conflict between superintendent George Suttor and doctors William Bland and Thomas Parmeter is read in the light of the therapeutic importance of adequate and undivided authority. The court of inquiry which heard details of the dispute between Suttor and Parmeter in 1818–19 shows a staff uncertain of who to obey and patients bearing the brunt of the officers&#39; efforts to establish control. I argue that the withholding, division and collapse of authority at Castle Hill were produced by the distinctive qualities and limitations of its context: a penal colony.

Incarceration, Migration, Dispossession, and Discovery: Medicine in Colonial Australia

Health and History

The British penal system gave impetus to European Australia. The transportation of convicts profo... more The British penal system gave impetus to European Australia. The transportation of convicts profoundly shaped the Australian colonies, not only in the backgrounds and histories of the colonial population, but in the constitutional and judicial arrangements installed around them, in the commissions of governors and civil officers, in fiscal and dietary calculations, and in the timber, brick and stone assembled into houses, forts and barracks. Hospitals and asylums were built from the same materials, for the presence of convicts also shaped the provision of medical care in the colonies. As well as a forced migration, the colonisation of Australia was a violent work of dispossession, and the medical history of colonial Australia therefore comprises narratives of invasion, incarceration, migration, and dispossession.

Catharine Coleborne,Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–1910

Social History of Medicine, 2016

The man who thought he was Napoleon: toward a political history of madness

Choice Reviews Online, 2015

The Politics of Madness in a Penal Colony: New South Wales, 1788-1856

Climate Distress: A Review of Current Psychological Research and Practice

Sustainability

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Admissions: Voices Within Mental Health ed. by David Stavanger, Radhiah Chowdhury and Mohammad Awad

Health and History

Eco-psychology: a critical paradigm in the climate emergency

Australian Psychologist

Planetary Health Histories: Toward New Ecologies of Epidemiology?

Isis

Psychology as if the whole earth mattered: Nuclear threat, environmental crisis, and the emergence of planetary psychology

History of Psychology, Dec 20, 2021

Bedlam at Botany Bay

Wrongful confinement and the spectre of colonial despotism: a political history of madness in New South Wales, 1843

History Australia

Greg EghigianThe Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health

Health and History, 2019

From the margins: madness and history in Australia

History Australia

The liability of madness and the commission of lunacy in New South Wales, 1805–12

History Australia

Sounding the Alarm on Climate Change, 1989 and 2019

New England Journal of Medicine

Sounding the Alarm on Climate Change, 1989 and 2019 As the climate crisis continues to unfold, th... more

Human Health on an Ailing Planet — Historical Perspectives on Our Future

New England Journal of Medicine

Human Health on an Ailing Planet In the face of a climate crisis, bringing environmental ethics i... more

Work, paperwork and the imaginary Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum, 1846

Rethinking History

Authority and the Treatment of the Insane at Castle Hill Asylum, 1811–25

Health and History

Incarceration, Migration, Dispossession, and Discovery: Medicine in Colonial Australia

Health and History

Catharine Coleborne,Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–1910

Social History of Medicine, 2016

The man who thought he was Napoleon: toward a political history of madness

Choice Reviews Online, 2015

The Politics of Madness in a Penal Colony: New South Wales, 1788-1856

Illness in colonial Australia [Book Review]

Review(s) of: Illness in colonial Australia, by F. B. Smith, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Nor... more

Peter H. Hoffenberg. A Science of Our Own: Exhibitions and the Rise of Australian Public Science. (Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century.) vii + 196 pp., figs., bibl., notes, index. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. $45 (cloth); ISBN 9780822945765. E-book available

Isis

Land of Mine (dir. Martin Zandvliet) [ABR Arts]

As the opening credits of Martin Zandvliet's Land of Mine appear, white letters on black, a recur... more

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Empathy for a convict conflicts with the harsh reality of stolen land: James Dunk reviews ‘Cotter: A Novel’ by Richard Begbie [Rochford Street Review]

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Finding Sanity, by Greg De Moore and Ann Westmore [Australian Book Review]

Australian Book Review no. 386 (November 2016): 66.

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The Sound, by Sarah Drummond [Rochford Street Review]

Published in Rochford Street Review no. 19 (September 2016).

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Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873-1910, by Catharine Coleborne [Social History of Medicine]

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Partisan, dir. Ariel Kleiman [ABR Arts Update]

Gregori stares at the camera, his eyes hard and sure as he watches five babies being wheeled thro... more Gregori stares at the camera, his eyes hard and sure as he watches five babies being wheeled through the corridors of a maternity ward, selects a mother with a split lip and no flowers, and charms her. When he strokes the face of her child, Alexander, his eyes are tender. The range between these expressions is the heart of Partisan.

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Seasons of War, by Christopher Lee [Australian Book Review]

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The Profilist: The Notebooks of Ethan Dibble, by Adrian Mitchell [Australian Book Review]

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The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon: Toward a Political History of Madness, by Laure Murat [Australian Book Review]

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F.B. Smith, Illness in colonial Australia [Journal of Australian Colonial History]

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James Dunk

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