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Dr. Guislain Museum Tour

  

On Friday 25 October 2013 a special tour is being arranged from 15.30 – 18.00 by the local congress organization. You will find more information about how to join them on this tour at the congress registration / information desk.

 

The Dr. Guislain Museum was opened amid great public interest in Ghent in September 1986. It was, in many ways, a new initiative. The location, the theme – the history of psychiatry, the approach…, all those things made people curious. At that time, no one had dared to imagine how the museum would develop through the years. Today, fifteen years later, one can look back on an eventful and constructive history.

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The great lack of knowledge and information on mental healthcare in general and on psychiatry in particular was one of the principal reasons why this psychiatry museum was opened. The resistance from old-time staff members in the mental healthcare sector against the idea of dedicating an entire museum to the evolution of psychiatry, showing both how it has progressed and where it did sometimes fail, was yet another symptom of the astonishing lack of general knowledge. However, that lack now proves an encouragement for us to try to fill that knowledge gap.

In addition, the museum plays an emancipating role on a social level by providing neutral and scientifically reliable information on the history of mental healthcare. Prejudices with regard to psychiatry do not only affect the way in which society regards this branch of public healthcare. They can also have grave consequences for the individual suffering from a mental disorder, who will all too often find that these biases prove an additional difficulty when he or she tries to find a place in society (of which he or she as a member just like everybody else) or when he or she tries to pursue a meaningful life in a way that is as autonomous and integrated as possible.

 

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The museum particularly hopes to succeed in proving that concepts like ‘madness’ or ‘psychiatric disorder’ are not purely medical concepts, but that there is always a socio-cultural and ideological structure behind them. Precisely the latter aspects can determine our attitude towards the mentally ill. The way in which psychiatry, as part of western medicine and together with the rest of society, approaches man, determines the insights it acquires, the impasses it is confronted to, and the way in which newly acquired knowledge is translated in social initiatives.

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That knowledge is, at the same time, an invitation to you, visitor, to enrich and diversify the way in which you picture man. Although the scope of the Dr. Guislain Museum has been become much broader through the years, the starting point for most exhibitions and other activities did remain the difference between normal and abnormal.

We hope that you will be sufficiently intrigued to come and visit this unique museum.

http://www.museumdrguislain.be/en/

 

 

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