‘I think I know a little bit about that anyway, so it’s okay’: Museum visitor strategies for disengaging with confronting mental health material

Abstract

Visitor engagement at museums is an area that has received significant attention from museum practitioners and academics over the last decade. However, very few studies have sought to understand how and why visitors may actively employ strategies to shut down attempts to elicit deep emotional engagement with museum material and messages. This paper looks at an exhibition in a major museum in Australia that discusses mental health and illness. It discusses the high rates of emotional disengagement that were found amongst 172 visitors who were faced with emotionally confronting material and argues that emotions enabled, as well as hindered, constructive, critical reflection amongst visitors.Key words: Mental-health, Museums, Engagement, Disengagement, Empathy

Emotions in the Museum of Medicine. An investigation of how museum educators employ emotions and what these emotions do

“…Depicting patients in this way is a continuation of the othering of people with mental illness. This emotional orientation is not uncommon when considering the results in Smith (2010), Gregory and Witcomb (2007, 268), Arnold de-Simine (2013, 47) and Dudley's (2017) research on visitors emotional response to war, colonialism and mental care in museums. It shows that visitors empathize with people of their own ethnicity, race or mental condition rather than with the 'other'.…”

“…Seeing emotional restraint as a refined sign is problematic, as not expressing emotions are commonly associated with able-bodied and sanist men, whereas women and people suffering from mental illness, on the other hand, are considered irrational, emotional, and not in control of their bodies and desires (see Ahmed 2014, 10;Obermark and Walters 2014, 66). Thus, withholding emotions must be understood not as an absence of emotions nor is it, as Smith (2010) and Dudley (2017) suggest, about disengaging with negative emotions but rather it is a different kind of emotional orientation. This orientation of emotions assists in identifying who it was possible to feel with (who was the legitimate object of emotions) and whom it was possible not to feel with.…”

“…The portrayals of patients, as discussed above, may result in visitors distancing themselves from patients' experiences, which can shut down opportunities for visitors to empathize with patients (Birdsall, Parry and Tkaczyk 2015, 52). Shutting down empathic engagement is a key question in museum and heritage studies, and researchers discuss how visitors disengage with emotions when encountering marginalized groups and difficult pasts (Gregory and Witcomb 2007;Smith 2006Smith , 2010Smith , 2015Smith , 2016Smith and Campbell 2016;Dudley 2017). Whereas these studies focus on visitors' feelings, I nevertheless suggest that it is important to recognize what Treninen states: that visitors' emotions are often controlled and supressed when in the company of museum practitioners (1994,59).…”

“…Visitors were seen as active consumers and producers of emotions in museums, not vessels to be filled with information (Bangall 2003, 87). Emotions, thus, became understood as central in heritage-making in terms of how visitors were both engaging and disengaging with emotions (Gregory and Witcomb 2007;Smith 2006Smith , 2010Smith , 2015Smith , 2016Watson 2015Watson , 2016Smith and Campbell 2016;Dudley 2017). The sensory nondiscursive level and how affect is provoked by the museum atmosphere was also understood as interwoven in the museum experience (Gregory and Witcomb 2007;Witcomb 2013;Schorch 2014; Tolia-Kelly, Waterton and Watson 2017; de Jong 2018).…”

“…In many of these discussions emotions and feelings are regarded as something positive and something that should be promoted in museums, as it is argued to provide a deep and critical insight amongst visitors. Dudley (2017), for example, calls for museum practitioners and scholars alike to determine how to facilitate meaningful emotional engagement amongst visitors. It is also suggested that emotions can facilitate a new imagined future (Witcomb 2013).…”