Amberlea Jones
Amberlea's PhD is titled: 'Northern Minds: Psychiatric Research at Newcastle University and Its International Influence, c. 1945–2000'
Project Description
Historiographical research on British psychiatry has often been shaped by an increasingly London- and Scotland-centred narrative. This project seeks to expand those frameworks by focusing on an underutilised local context. My work examines how psychiatric researchers at Newcastle University helped shape psychiatric knowledge in the mid-to-late twentieth century. The context for modern psychiatric thought can be found in the overhaul of psychiatric practice within the late twentieth century, particularly due to the processes of deinstitutionalisation and transinstitutionalisation, which reshaped the institutional and clinical environments in which research was produced. By studying this period, this project not only highlights the importance of Newcastle, but also contributes to a broader understanding of how psychiatric knowledge develops over time, showing that many of the tensions visible in this period continue to permeate psychiatric research and debate today.
Rather than treating Newcastle as a peripheral extension of psychiatric knowledge production, this study places it at the foreground, exploring how it influenced multiple aspects of psychiatric research on both national and international scales. In doing so, it also highlights the significance of individual researchers and professional networks within the Newcastle School, and how their personal and institutional contexts shaped the development of their work. Newcastle University functioned as a significant centre of psychiatric research, with strengths across a range of subfields including psychogeriatrics, child and adolescent psychiatry, diagnostic systems, and depression research. Its breadth of activity and growing reputation under the stewardship of Sir Martin Roth established it as an influential hub of psychiatric inquiry, one that has been comparatively overlooked in favour of more generalised accounts of British psychiatry. Through the use of archival sources and a wealth of published materials, I examine the way in which research produced by Newcastle University has been taken and used to further expand psychiatric knowledge. In this process, this project contributes to a re-evaluation of British psychiatric historiography by destabilising dominant narratives and highlighting the importance of local contexts and smaller case studies.
Publications
Alessandro Bianchi and Amberlea Jones, "Demythologising Psychiatry: A Collaborative Approach to Deconstructing Extremes in the Historical Perception of Mental Health Care in Britain and France," Pro Tempore, no. 20 (2026): TBC.
Conferences
“Developing Diagnostic Systems in Psychiatry: The Newcastle Scale.” on the panel “Defining and Diagnosing Mental (In) Capacity.” – Life Histories in Mind – Manchester Metropolitan University, July 2026.
"St. Nicholas Hospital, Newcastle: Ethical Implications in the Study of Deinstitutionalisation and Its Legacy." on the panel "Communities, Legacies and Loss." - 25th Annual Cambridge Heritage Symposium: Pathways of Afterlives - Tracing, Uncovering, and Researching Legacies of the Past, May 2025.