Blog Post | The Publics of Mental Health and the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive
Medical Humanities Blog Post
The Publics of Mental Health and the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive
Dr Hannah Blythe provides insight into the British Film Institute National Archive’s holdings as they relate to health humanities. This research was part of the University of Oxford project The Public’s Health, supported by a John Fell OUP Research Fund Grant.
The British Film Institute National Archive (bfi.org.uk) holds vast promise for the study of public health from the perspectives of history, ethics, and the wider health humanities. This rich and extensive collection of moving images operates as the British national archive for film and television, and is one of the largest moving images archives in the world. It hosts predominantly British and colonial media, but contains some international materials. Moving images have, since the early twentieth century, become the predominant form of public health communication, and the BFI preserves such film and television materials from across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
It is well established that the audiences of public health communications have been myriad and diverse. In particular, public health messaging raises key conceptual issues as to who defines health, to what degree health programmes and opportunities are equally accessible, and the collective responsibilities and private rights of modern citizens. In other words, who are the ‘public’ of public health messaging (Mold, Clark and Elizabeth 2023; Coggon 2012)? I here take one theme – mental health – to consider the opportunities and challenges presented by the BFI National Archive for researchers in the humanities addressing these questions.
Mental Health Films
The archive is a treasure trove for humanities scholars who research public mental health. Indeed, it is the repository for moving images traditionally associated with public health communication, housing the collection of the Central Office of Information (COI). The COI was the UK state’s communications agency between 1946 and 2011, and created informational films about health for the general public and for distribution within the health service. The Ministry/Department of Health commissioned many of these COI films. Examples of COI-sponsored films in the archive include C.A.L.M (1997), an advert for a Manchester-based suicide-prevention hotline, Understanding Aggression (1960), a film for training NHS psychiatric nurses, and Rehabilitation at Roffey Park (1946), a documentary about an experimental facility dedicated to rehabilitation from ‘industrial neurosis’. The ‘publics’ at whom the first two pieces were directed are relatively clear. C.A.L.M. targeted men experiencing depression who were at risk of suicide. It aired on ITV in North West England. Understanding Aggression was for training NHS staff, prompting us to think of clinicians as a public of healthcare education videos. Roffey Park’s intended audience is a little more complex. Grace Whorrall-Campbell’s (2025) recent article highlights the appeal of this film to the broad range of contributors to Roffey Park’s ‘rehabilitation’ work, including management scientists, trade unionists, psychiatrists and social workers.
These three films feature in an excellent blog on the BFI website. This list, curated by Patrick Russell and Jez Stewart, was published in aid of Mental Health Awareness Week 2025 and designed to demonstrate the diversity of material related to mental health held by the BFI. It contains films from between 1940 and 1997, and features, for example, a humorous animation alongside the COI pieces. The blog facilitates full online viewing of the ten films. Indeed, the BFI offers a variety of modes of viewing its materials besides curated online resources. The Mediatheque, situated on London’s Southbank, is a public venue in which a larger selection of items can be watched. Of course, relying solely on these curated facilities for research purposes would generate conclusions based on BFI staff’s selection criteria. However, the full range of materials is also available for ordering and viewing in the archive.
Communications: Advice and Journalism
The impressive variety of the BFI’s collection raises the question of how far we might wish to broaden the notion of public health film. Investigative journalism, for example, is also part the moving images relating to mental health available at the BFI Mediatheque. The Mediatheque hosts a 2001 episode of The London Programme (a current affairs series transmitted on ITV between 1975 and 2008), that linked an alleged ‘autism explosion’ to the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Connections drawn by medical researchers and journalists between the MMR vaccine and autism resulted in a downturn in uptake and raised profound ethical questions about discourses of autism in scientific and public debate, and indeed, who should be part of such debates (Millward, 2019). Further research would be necessary to understand the programme-makers’ intentions (the creation of informed journalism or bait for concerned parents?), but investigative health journalism evokes vital ethical questions regarding, the balance between the right to critique medical institutions and the risk of inaccuracy; the need to assess the risks of public health interventions from a wide variety of perspectives; the possibility of the spread of misinformation via reputable broadcasting services, and attitudes towards psychological experiences such as autism. In the UK, no vaccinations are legally compulsory, based at least partly on the principle that adults have the right to make decisions about their own health and the health of children of whom they have guardianship (Giubilini, 2021). However, the BFI’s archive raises the question of how this principle should be applied in a real-word and democratic information ecosystem. Social media is frequently seen to have caused an eruption of public health misinformation, but a historical perspective reminds us that the MMR controversy, which has ongoing implications, occurred before the social media age and that older moving image technologies can place such current concerns into a longer-term context.
Communications: Dramatisation, Fiction and Entertainment
Different types of public health film and their publics outline the importance of the relationship between dramatisation, fiction, and the entertainment industry. Certainly, soap operas have been harnessed to communicate public health messages, and the BFI holds episodes of Coronation Street (Walton, 2024). Additionally, contextualising the COI’s films highlights the need to consider informational film production alongside the entertainment film industry and its international dimensions. For example, Out of True (1951), which appears in Russell and Stewart’s list, was commissioned by the COI. It promoted British psychiatric services by dramatising a woman’s ‘mental breakdown’ and voluntary admittance to a mental hospital (as psychiatric in-patient institutions were then known). She is treated sympathetically by staff, undergoes a mixture of physical and psychotherapeutic interventions, gradually recovers, and returns to her life. Tim Snelson and William R. Macauley (2020) illustrate the origins of this film. They explore the reaction of Britain’s film censorship apparatus to a fiction film called The Snake Pit, released in the US in 1948 and submitted to the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC, later renamed the British Board of Film Classification) in 1949. The BBFC is the UK’s film and video regulator (https://www.bbfc.co.uk/what-we-do). The Snake Pit portrays a woman admitted to a US mental hospital and subjected to harsh and ineffective physical treatments, including electro-convulsion therapy and insulin therapy. She is then treated with psychotherapeutic methods, and gradually recovers. This film critiqued conditions in mental hospitals. Snelson and Macauley note that the BBFC cut parts of The Snake Pit and issued a disclaimer that it was not about Britain. They also note that the COI commissioned Out of True (1951) as a riposte to the American film’s depiction of mental hospitals. This history of censorship, commercial film, and international networks reveals the complex and competing approaches of filmmakers and COI and BBFC personnel to imagining and addressing the cinema-going publics of these films. An interdisciplinary approach, combining history with film studies and aesthetic and narrative analysis, can generate rich insights into the intersection of drama, public health agendas, and their reception.
Accessing the Archive
The BFI’s archive has undoubtedly contributed to illuminating work on the nature of public health communication. However, some work is required before this resource can be harnessed to its full potential for academic and interdisciplinary humanities research. In particular, the archive is, unfortunately, hampered by an unreliable and challenging catalogue as well as difficulties with its catalogue search functions. As a result, it is possible to find individual films for in-depth analysis and develop a flavour of the archive’s content, but the nature of the catalogue precludes systematic survey of the collection. Particularly for researchers such as historians who rely on catalogues to contextualise individual films, this presents an obstacle to understanding the full nature of public health films as a genre. In-depth analysis of a single film can reveal much about a single institution and its ethical practices, for example, but it tells us little about that institution’s typicality within a given space or time. It is difficult to establish, for example, the number of films sponsored by the COI about vaccines, measles, or influenza, key context for further historical analysis. Moreover, the inability to generate a reliable survey of the BFI’s archive leaves us pondering the basic but tantalising question: what exactly is in there?
Regardless of the awkwardness of the BFI’s catalogue, it is clear that the BFI archive is a rich and key resource for understanding the nature of modern public health, particularly for scholars in the health humanities. Its substantial collections of screen works that fall under the category of ‘public health messaging’ include films of the COI, British television, and pre-NHS health information. While many of these are openly available online through BFI Player and have been promoted through blogs and collections such as the ‘NHS on Film’, further refinements of the BFI’s catalogue alongside academic research will help to analyse and showcase the many ways in which the ‘public’ has been defined, represented, and shaped by public health communications in modern Britain.
Dr Hannah Blythe was a researcher on the University of Oxford JFF-funded project ‘The Public’s Health,’ and is a historian and health humanities researcher at the University of Leeds.
References and Further Reading
Berridge, Virginia, Public Health: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2016)
C.A.L.M. (1997), BFI National Archive, BFI Identifier: 584460
Coronation Street (1962), BFI National Archive, BFI Identifier: 102
Coronation Street (1981), BFI National Archive, BFI Identifier: 122
Coggon, John. What Makes Health Public? A Critical Evaluation of Moral, Legal, and Political Claims in Public Health (Cambridge, 2012).
Giubilini, Alberto, ‘Vaccination Ethics’, British Medical Bulletin, 137 (2021), pp. 4-12. https://doi.org/10.1093/bmb/ldaa036
Millward, Gareth, Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War (Manchester, 2019).
Mold, Alex, Clark, Pedar and Elizabeth, Hannah J., Publics and Their Health (Manchester, 2023).
Mold, Alex, Berridge, Virginia, Gorsky, Martin, Crook, Tom, Sheard, Sally, and Seaton, Andrew (2023). Lessons from the History of British Health Policy. Other. The British Academy, London. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5871/bapolhist/9780856726859.001
Out of True (1951), BFI National Archive, BFI Identifiers, 40456
Rehabilitation at Roffey Park (1946), BFI National Archive, BFI Identifier: 269000
Russell, Patrick and Stewart, Jez (2025), ‘Mental Health Awareness Week: 10 films showing the evolution of mental healthcare in the UK’, BFI Lists, https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/mental-health-awareness-week-10-films-showing-evolution-mental-healthcare-uk.
Snelson, Tim and Macauley, William R., ‘The Influence of “Psychiatrist Friends” on British Film Censorship in the 1960s’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 17(4) (2020), pp. 473–500. https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2020.0543
The London Programme (2001), BFI National Archive, BFI Identifier: 629966.
Understanding Aggression (1960), BFI National Archive, BFI Identifier: 13534
Walton, Jennier L., ‘Soap Operas Raising Awareness of Physical and Mental Wellness’ in Christina S. Beck (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication and Popular Culture (Oxford, 2024), pp. 244-256.
Whorrall-Campbell, Grace, ‘Rehabilitation at Roffey Park: Management and Psychiatry in Occupational Mental Health, 1943-83’, History of the Human Sciences 38(5) (2025), pp. 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951251336052
www.bfi.org.uk/bfi-national-archive, viewed 18/11/25.
Image credit: www.bfi.org.uk/bfi-national-archive
