GART-PSYSPAC · Psychiatric spaces in transition: discourse, dwelling, doing

Psychiatric spaces in transition: discourse, dwelling, doing

How societies treat their members once termed ‘mad’ and now termed ‘mentally ill’ is an index of civic willingness to promote human flourishing for all. Of particular significance are dedicated spaces – ‘psychiatric spaces’ – created for the care and maybe cure of such individuals, notably the most 'institutional' of such spaces comprised by large residential settings for in-patients, the asylums of old now recast as mental hospitals or psychiatric campuses. How such spaces are inhabited, used and understood, positively and negatively, by in-patients – but also by doctors, nurses, ancillary workers, volunteers, neighbours and others – become core issues for assessing broader patterns of social transformation. The objective here is to foster an experience-based and overtly ‘spatialised’ perspective on European psychiatric transition between older institutional and more recent de-institutional mental health care. Specifically, it explores the experiences of different cohorts of patients, staff and others for whom Gartnavel Royal Hospital, Glasgow (Scotland, UK) has been a central point of reference, encounter and meaning. Gartnavel comprises a near-unique site, having housed a ‘lunatic asylum’ since the 1840s now closed and in partial ruins, alongside smaller wards/facilities added subsequently and a state-of-the-art acute in-patient facility opened in 2007-8. The overall site encompasses a diversity of spaces, each tied to different phases of psychiatric transition, and the project recovers experiences correlated with both Gartnavel as a whole and also with particular spaces (buildings, wards, corridors, gardens, walks). Probing and interpreting such experiences enables us to scale up to re-evaluate the intersections of psychiatric transition and social transformation. A crucial conclusion is that ways forward for future psychiatric landscapes need to fuse the obvious gains from modernised, ‘enlightened’ and dignity-enhancing environments with what appears to have been the more organic production of sharing, community and busy-ness attendant on the less segregated geographies of older institutions. Additionally – mirroring reflections from participants, many of whom acknowledge the inevitable imperfections and risks associated with residential-institutional settings – we believe that there is still a crucial place for ‘the asylum’ (in all of the positive senses of refuge and respite) as one facet within a distributed portfolio of deinstitutionalised mental health provisions.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз