The Afterlives of the Psychiatric Asylum

’This fascinating piece of academic detection traces what happens to psychiatric asylums after they are closed. Who’d have guessed that these forbidding monoliths would someday be reinvented as college campuses, housing estates and theme parks? Using case studies from around the world, the authors reveal how the imposing ruins of past good intentions are transformed into a mundane present.’ Michael Dear, University of California, Berkeley, USA ’Are there any asylums left? Well, yes and no. Discredited as suitable spaces for treating people with mental health problems, almost everywhere they have been threatened with closure. And yet they persist, these stubborn physical presences on the landscape. Ruined, re-used in new ways, still partially used for mental health purposes, even re-invented as modern mental health resorts: the asylums still haunt us materially and imaginatively. This book wonderfully explores the complex, often paradoxical, after-lives of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth century lunatic asylums, asking profound questions about how these edgy spaces illuminate the recycling, reworking and resisting of the stigmas that can cling resolutely to both people and place. It is a landmark text for cross-disciplinary critical mental health studies.’ Chris Philo, University of Glasgow, UK