Hold Me in a Circle of Tender Listening: Listening-with an oral history archive of women's psychiatric experience to create a multi-channel sound work

This practice research explores five women’s recordings from the Mental Health Testimony Archive (British Library and Mental Health Media 1999/2000), an archive of fifty oral history testimonies recorded in 1999 and 2000. Working solely with the audio from these testimonies, I have developed methods for listening -with survivors of psychiatry in order to create a polyvocal, multichannel sound installation that enables encounters -with women who have been systematically silenced. I started this project from a position of lived experience and have used my embodied entanglement to engage the affective and haunted registers of women’s testimonial recordings. Working with sound, in all of its ephemerality and permeability, this research brings women out of their archival isolation and into dialogue with each other. Through practices of listening-with and compositioning I have engaged with the spoken and the unspoken, the non-narrativizable and paralinguistic qualities of voice, both human and non-human, such as the sounds of a constantly moving tongue, a fax machine beeping and a page being turned, in order to activate and stage an archive, creating new assemblages of listening. The research traverses a number of disciplines including voice and sound studies, listening and oral history. It engages with transgenerational haunting, demonstrating how twentieth century psychiatry continues to haunt the present, including current psychiatric practices affecting bodies and crossing spatial and temporal borders, through diasporic voices and media technologies. It asserts that psychiatry, which considers itself a listening profession, has often failed to listen, and asks questions about recovery narratives and oral history as projects for capturing life stories. Completing this research at time when both the mental health of the UK population and mental health services are deemed by many to be in crisis (MIND 2023; Mahasep 2023) the work makes an important contribution to conversations about psychiatry’s past, present and future. It shows how testimony never represents simply a record of the past, but rather deepens the historical present in ways that can be felt. The research develops new, embodied methods for listening-with, not in order to assimilate or ‘know’ the other, but in ways that accept uncertainty, being-with, side-by-side, listening and relating in ways that can be transformative. In the end, I hope that audiences of this work, will take the opportunity to reflect on women’s experiences of psychiatry in ways that might lead them to consider how things could be different.