This paper looks at the history of Britain’s first community-based mental health charities, focusing on the Mental After-Care Association (MACA), founded in 1879. It looks at how these charities approached recovery from mental illness, and consequently sheds light on the birth of British psychotherapy. It shows how psychotherapy emerged from a collection of interpersonal practices developed by philanthropists and medical professionals to engender and sustain mental health. It reveals how women working in administrative and professional psychiatric capacities were influential in this process.
Appreciating early psycho-medical charities’ involvement in the germination of British psychotherapeutics uncovers how philanthropists’ ideals regarding the good and healthy self, the moral virtues of certain kinds of friendship, and Chrisian social duties, were actively woven into practices adopted and claimed by psychiatric professionals, and which have since become presented as value-free medical interventions.

Dr Hannah Blythe is a historian and health humanities researcher with a background in policy and public affairs. Her research focuses on mental health, psychiatry, psychology, charity, and the National Health Service. At Leeds, she works on the Constructing Moral Babies project, using interdisciplinary methods to explore the history and policy of the infant mind.

Before joining Leeds, Hannah was a Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she researched the role of charity in the British National Health Service. Before that, she completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge, with an affiliation at the Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health. Her PhD examines the history of Britain’s first community mental health charities, 1879-1939, with a focus on their approaches to recovery from mental illness and their roles in the birth of British psychotherapy. She has also worked in policy and public affairs in the charity sector, local government and UK Parliament.