How Cities Memorialize Mental Illness Shapes Public Perception
A Swedish study reveals that street names honoring a poet with psychiatric history may reinforce harmful stereotypes about mental illness rather than challenge them. For cities redesigning former hospital sites and heritage planners, the findings highlight how urban design choices can either advance or undermine mental health stigma reduction efforts.
Originaltitel: Street Names and the Narration of Madness in a Post-Asylum Landscape
<p>The aim of this article is to discuss street naming at Ulleråker, a former psychiatric hospital located in the town Uppsala in southeastern Sweden. Specifically, the article explores streets named after Gustaf Fröding’s poems: what kinds of stories are narrated in the urban landscape when Fröding’s poems are used as inspiration for street names? Fröding (1860–1911) is a well-known Swedish writer and poet who was an inmate at Ulleråker. Furthermore, the article explores the cultural heritage this produces in the post-asylum landscape. The street-naming process and the street names are subjected to a mad reading, and the article adopts theories and methodologies from Critical Heritage Studies, Human Geography, and Mad Studies. I argue that the street naming builds on sanist discourses that further gendered and classed stereotypes of people diagnosed with mental distress. These discourses are then subverted, and the article shows how the street names narrate and materialize different kinds of experiences of madness in the post-asylum landscape.</p>