I had such a wonderful time today meeting with Nan Yamane at Rose Bakery‘s tea room!
Nan is a retired lecturer who has conducted research and taught at CSUN, California State University Northridge
Nan was visiting Paris while attending the Alcohol and Drugs History Society‘s annual conference at Campus Condorcet on the outskirts of Paris.
She gave a talk (click here for Nan Yamane’sabstract) on Wilma Wilson, a wannabe Hollywood star who was committed at Camarillo State Mental Hospital in the 40’s.
Nan and I first got in touch in 2010 (16 years ago !) while I was writing a master thesis on the Camarillo Hospital. At that time I was enrolled at EHESS, Centre Koyré.
It has been published in French and you can get it there.
Our mutual interest was one of the female inmates : the glamourous and zany Wilma Wilson who was brutally murdered by a young soldier. Apparently, according to the police investigation, she had teased him and then rejected him.
At that time, I was invited to the Séminaire (workshop) Psychologie, psychiatrie et psychanalyse : histoires croisées, organized by Jacqueline Carroy, Jean-Christophe Coffin, Régine Plas and the late and regretted Annick Ohayon to talk about Wilma Wilson.
I later gave a talk at Birbeck College (1-3 December 2011) in London, during the international conference “First-person writing, four-way reading” sponsored by the European Science Foundation. It was centered mainly on Wilma and it was called “Gender narratives in psychiatry : women nurses and patients.”
Anyway, all that was a long time ago and I’m thrilled to learn that Nan is teeming with so many projects on Wilma and the Camarillo Hospital.
I look forward to reading her papers or books on the subject.
At that time, my purpose (as it has always been with my writing) was to disentangle myth from reality, to tell the truth from all the lies and misrepresentations about this mysterious hospital.
The task is huge (since most patients’ records have been lost) but Nan has done an incredibly good job patching bits and pieces and conducting oral interviews with former CAM workers and Wilma’s great grand niece.
If you want to read more from myself on Wilma, si vous voulez en savoir plus sur Wilma Wilson, I chose to publish my talk given at Koyré Center on the website Comme des fous, j’avais choisi de faire publier mon article « Faire Carrière grâce à l’internement » sur le site Comme des fous, qui est animé par des pairs-aidants, des patients, en collaboration avec l’Orspere-Samdarra, observatoire national sur la santé mentale et les vulnérabilités sociales.
You can read it there, in French.
To read the review Emmanuelle Dal’Secco, journalist for Handicap, wrote about my book on the Camarillo Hospital, click here.
Pour lire l’article que la journaliste Emmanuelle Dal’Secco, du site spécialisé handicap.fr, a consacré à mon livre, clickez ici.
Nan, I will definitely visit you with my husband and son when we come back to California !
