Thread by @AndrewBrunatti

#OTD in 1822, #ViscountCastlereagh, Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons, died by his own hand.

Thanks very much to those of you who have followed my #Castlereagh200 threads, looking at Castlereagh's career through the lens of mental health.

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#twitterstorians

I was at a loss for how to mark the day after spending the last 2 years writing the research article on which all these tweets are based.

Maybe something more reflective is fitting.

I had always been interested in Castlereagh from a diplomatic and political standpoint...

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...and became increasingly interested in exploring the mental health aspect of his story because it was a challenging area that would combine history, politics, psychology, medicine, and other disciplines.

So I started researching in 2020.

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Then the pandemic arrived. As I researched and wrote over the next 2 years, I also watched first-hand as public servants were responding to the pandemic and a half dozen other crises that seemed to roll in one after another. Stress levels were high and pretty much constant.

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In my day job, I lead a team of very dedicated civil servants. I found that the research on Castlereagh and mental health was starting to take on real-life relevance, making me consider how I was leading and how I could do better to protect mental health for my team and I.

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I also talked to a range of people about the research and found that a historical case seemed to have benefits.
First, many people readily engaged with the history (because it's at a distance?), but then inevitably started to compare it to their own professional experience.

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And second, talking about Castlereagh's historical 'story' seemed to engage people in ways that the official-speak of corporate mental health action plans just did not. There were a lot of "Wait, maybe that *is* a mental health issue" type of conversations.

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So there's a little bit of a different legacy for Castlereagh two centuries later. Not high politics or global diplomacy this time...but valuable #MentalHealthAwareness.

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