The Last Asylum

In the late 1970s, Barbara Taylor, then an acclaimed young historian, began to suffer from severe anxiety. In the years that followed, Taylor's world contracted around her illness. Eventually, she was admitted to what had once been England's largest psychiatric institutions, the infamous Friern Mental Hospital in London

The last 40 years has seen a significant shift from state commitment to asylum-based mental health care to a mixed economy of care in a variety of locations. In the wake of this deinstitutionalisation, attention to date has focussed on users and providers of care. The consequences for the idea and fabric of the psychiatric asylum have remained 'stones unturned'. This book address an enduring yet under-examined question: what has become of the asylum? Focussing on the 'recycling' of both the idea of the psychiatric asylum and its sites, buildings and landscapes, this book makes theoretical connections to current trends in mental health care and to ideas in cultural/urban geography. The process of closing asylums and how asylums have survived in specific contexts and markets is assessed and consideration given to the enduring attraction of asylum and its repackaging as well as to retained mental health uses on former asylum sites, new uses on former sites, and interpretations of the derelict psychiatric asylum. The key questions examined are the challenges posed in seeking new uses for former asylums, the extent to which re-use can transcend stigma yet sustain memory and how location is critical in shaping the future of asylum and asylum sites.

Madeleine Roux's New York Times bestselling Asylum is a thrilling and creepy photo-illustrated novel that Publishers Weekly called "a strong YA debut that reveals the enduring impact of buried trauma on a place." For sixteen-year-old Dan Crawford, the New Hampshire College Prep program is the chance of a lifetime. Except that when Dan arrives, he finds that the usual summer housing has been closed, forcing students to stay in the crumbling Brookline Dorm. The dorm was formerly a sanatorium, more commonly known as an asylum. And not just any asylum—a last resort for the criminally insane. As Dan and his new friends Abby and Jordan start exploring Brookline's twisty halls and hidden basement, they uncover disturbing secrets about what really went on at Brookline . . . secrets that link Dan and his friends to the asylum's dark past. Because Brookline was no ordinary asylum, and there are some secrets that refuse to stay buried. Featuring found photographs from real asylums and filled with chilling mystery and page-turning suspense, Asylum is a horror story that treads the line between genius and insanity, perfect for fans of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Don't miss any of the books in the Asylum series, or Madeleine Roux's shivery fantasy series, House of Furies!

A total institution is defined by Goffman as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated, individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. Prisons serve as a clear example, providing we appreciate that what is prison-like about prisons is found in institutions whose members have broken no laws. This volume deals with total institutions in general and, mental hospitals, in particular. The main focus is, on the world of the inmate, not the world of the staff. A chief concern is to develop a sociological version of the structure of the self. Each of the essays in this book were intended to focus on the same issue--the inmate's situation in an institutional context. Each chapter approaches the central issue from a different vantage point, each introduction drawing upon a different source in sociology and having little direct relation to the other chapters. This method of presenting material may be irksome, but it allows the reader to pursue the main theme of each paper analytically and comparatively past the point that would be allowable in chapters of an integrated book. If sociological concepts are to be treated with affection, each must be traced back to where it best applies, followed from there wherever it seems to lead, and pressed to disclose the rest of its family.

The Saskatchewan Mental Hospital at Weyburn has played a significant role in the history of psychiatric services, mental health research, and providing care in the community. Its history provides a window to the changing nature of mental health services over the 20th century. Built in 1921, Saskatchewan Mental Hospital was considered the last asylum in North America and the largest facility of its kind in the British Commonwealth. A decade later the Canadian Committee for Mental Hygiene cited it as one of the worst facilities in the country, largely due to extreme overcrowding. In the 1950s the Saskatchewan Mental Hospital again attracted international attention for engaging in controversial therapeutic interventions, including treatments using LSD. In the 1960s, sweeping healthcare reforms took hold in the province and mental health institutions underwent dramatic changes as they began transferring patients into communities. As the patient and staff population shrunk, the once palatial building fell into disrepair, the asylum’s expansive farmland went out of cultivation, and mental health services folded into a complicated web of social and correctional services. Erika Dyck’s "Managing Madness" examines an institution that housed people we struggle to understand, help, or even try to change.

"Whew! They going to send around here and tie you up and drag you off to Milledgeville. Them fat blue police chasing tomcats around alleys." —Berenice in The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers A scathing and original look at the racist origins of the field of modern psychiatry, told through the story of what was once the largest mental institution in the world, by the prize-winning author of Memoir of a Race Traitor After a decade of research, Mab Segrest, whose Memoir of a Race Traitor forever changed the way we think about race in America, turns sanity itself inside-out in a stunning book that will become an instant classic. In December 1841, the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum was founded on land taken from the Cherokee nation in the then-State capitol of Milledgeville. A hundred years later, it had become the largest insane asylum in the world with over ten thousand patients. To this day, it is the site of the largest graveyard of disabled and mentally ill people in the world. In April, 1949, Ebony magazine reported that for black patients, "the situation approaches Nazi concentration camp standards . . . unbelievable this side of Dante's Inferno." Georgia's state hospital was at the center of psychiatric practice and the forefront of psychiatric thought throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America—centuries during which the South invented, fought to defend, and then worked to replace the most developed slave culture since the Roman Empire. A landmark history of a single insane asylum at Milledgeville, Georgia, A Peculiar Inheritance reveals how modern-day American psychiatry was forged in the traumas of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, when African Americans carrying "no histories" entered from Freedmen's Bureau Hospitals and home counties wracked with Klan terror. This history set the stage for the eugenics and degeneracy theories of the twentieth century, which in turn became the basis for much of Nazi thinking in Europe. Segrest's masterwork will forever change the way we think about our own minds.

In July 1988, Canadian-born historian Barbara Taylor was admitted into Friern, a once-notorious asylum for the insane. The journey that took her there began when, overwhelmed by anxiety as she completed her doctoral studies in London, England, she found relief by dosing herself with booze and barbiturates. She then embarked on what would turn out to be a decades-long course of psychoanalysis.The analysis dredged up painful memories—of a philandering father, a largely absent but demanding mother, and, among other things, a succession of nannies back in Saskatoon. In the course of her illness and her struggle to recover from it, Taylor would twice be readmitted to Friern, and she took refuge in a variety of hostels and halfway houses before finding a semblance of stability and peace. This searingly honest, thought-provoking, and beautifully written memoir is the narrative of the author’s years of madness, set inside the wider story of our treatment of psychiatric illness from the great age of asylums to the current era of community care, big pharma, and quick fixes. It is a meditation on her own experience, but also that of millions of others in Europe and in North America who have suffered, are suffering, and will suffer from mental illness.

Powerful photographs of the grand exteriors and crumbling interiors of America's abandoned state mental hospitals. For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948, they housed more than a half million patients. The blueprint for these hospitals was set by Pennsylvania hospital superintendant Thomas Story Kirkbride: a central administration building flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas. Kirkbride and others believed that well-designed buildings and grounds, a peaceful environment, a regimen of fresh air, and places for work, exercise, and cultural activities would heal mental illness. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these beautiful, massive buildings—and the patients who lived in them—neglected and abandoned. Architect and photographer Christopher Payne spent six years documenting the decay of state mental hospitals like these, visiting seventy institutions in thirty states. Through his lens we see splendid, palatial exteriors (some designed by such prominent architects as H. H. Richardson and Samuel Sloan) and crumbling interiors—chairs stacked against walls with peeling paint in a grand hallway; brightly colored toothbrushes still hanging on a rack; stacks of suitcases, never packed for the trip home. Accompanying Payne's striking and powerful photographs is an essay by Oliver Sacks (who described his own experience working at a state mental hospital in his book Awakenings). Sacks pays tribute to Payne's photographs and to the lives once lived in these places, “where one could be both mad and safe.”