Asylum Ways of Seeing uncovers a patient culture within twentieth-century American psychiatric hospitals that did not just imbibe ideas from the outside world, but generated ones of their own. In illuminating seemingly resigned patients in these settings, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation.
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.”
An ethnography of the difficult experiences of refugees in Brazil. In 2013, as Syrians desperate to escape a brutal war fled the country, Brazil took the remarkable step of instituting an open-door policy for all Syrian refugees. Why did Brazil—in contrast to much of the international community—offer asylum to any Syrian who would come? And how do Syrians differ from other refugee populations seeking status in Brazil? In The Color of Asylum, Katherine Jensen offers an ethnographic look at the process of asylum seeking in Brazil, uncovering the different ways asylum seekers are treated and the racial logic behind their treatment. She focuses on two of the largest and most successful groups of asylum seekers: Syrian and Congolese refugees. While the groups obtain asylum status in Brazil at roughly equivalent rates, their journey to that status could not be more different, with Congolese refugees enduring significantly greater difficulties at each stage, from arrival through to their treatment by Brazilian officials. As Jensen shows, Syrians, meanwhile, receive better treatment because the Brazilian state recognizes them as white, in a nation that has historically privileged white immigration. Ultimately, however, Jensen reaches an unexpected conclusion: Regardless of their country of origin, even migrants who do secure asylum status find their lives remain extremely difficult, marked by struggle and discrimination.
This book is a must-read for any specialist in the history of colonial and post-colonial psychiatry, as well as a fantastic case study for those interested in the social history of European colonialism more generally.― Choice Claire Edington's fascinating look at psychiatric care in French colonial Vietnam challenges our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting, run by experts with unchallenged authority, from which patients rarely left. She shows instead a society in which Vietnamese communities and families actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that strengthened the power of the colonial state, even as they also forced French experts to engage with local understandings of, and practices around, insanity. Beyond the Asylum reveals how psychiatrists, colonial authorities, and the Vietnamese public debated both what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, throughout the early twentieth century. Straddling the fields of colonial history, Southeast Asian studies and the history of medicine, Beyond the Asylum shifts our perspective from the institution itself to its relationship with the world beyond its walls. This world included not only psychiatrists and their patients, but also prosecutors and parents, neighbors and spirit mediums, as well as the police and local press. How each group interacted with the mentally ill, with each other, and sometimes in opposition to each other, helped decide the fate of those both in and outside the colonial asylum.
Since the global financial crisis of 2008, Greece has shouldered a heavy burden struggling with internal political and financial insecurity as well as hosting enormous numbers of migrants and asylum seekers who arrive by land and sea. In On the Doorstep of Europe, Heath Cabot presents an ethnographic study of the asylum system in Greece, tracing the ways asylum seekers, bureaucrats, and service providers attempt to navigate the dilemmas of governance, ethics, knowledge, and social relations that emerge through this legal process. Centering on the work of an asylum advocacy NGO in Athens, Cabot explores how workers and clients grapple with predicaments endemic to Europeanization and rights-based protection. Drawing inspiration from classical Greek tragedy to highlight both the transformative potential and violence of law, Cabot charts the structural violence effected through European governance, rights frameworks, and humanitarian intervention while also exploring how Greek society is being remade from the inside out. She shows how, in contemporary Greece, relationships between insiders and outsiders are radically reconfigured through legal, political, and economic crises. Now updated with a preface reflecting on the critical stakes of the book's exploration of refuge in light of events that have transpired in and beyond Europe since its initial publication, On the Doorstep of Europe highlights how border crossers and residents in countries of arrival navigate legal and political violence. Cabot's on-the-ground account of asylum and immigration in Europe's borderlands, based on fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2011, shows how the difficulties encountered by asylum seekers in an earlier time remain relevant and revealing in the face of ongoing crises and challenges today.
Closing The Asylum: The Mental Patient in Modern Society. The Covid-19 pandemic has affected the mental health of almost everyone, but it has impacted most severely on disadvantaged groups such as people with severe mental health problems, throwing pre-existing inequalities into sharper and starker relief. Though they had mostly all been closed by the turn of the century, the passing of the old Victorian asylums is still a matter of enduring controversy. In this acclaimed book, first published almost thirty years ago, Peter Barham examines the changing fortunes of mental patients in the era of the asylum and after. He demonstrates powerfully that the closure of mental hospitals cannot meet the real needs of people with severe mental health problems without a profound rethinking of the role, rights and status of the former mental patient in society. In a prologue to this new edition, he highlights the ironies of a post-asylum present afflicted by welfare minimalism, widespread deprivation and impoverishment, and a dramatic increase in the use of coercion and constraint in the delivery of mental health care. Closing the Asylum sets the scene for understanding how the experience of being treated as second class citizens has come about, and the author's forceful warnings of the dangers in the current mental health scene are highly germane to any consideration of what must change in our society after Covid. Veteran mental health survivor and campaigner Peter Campbell also contributes a preface in which he examines the passing of the asylums, and their after-life, in the light of his own experience.
In the first book devoted to the history of hospital- and asylum-visiting covering the 18th to the late-20th centuries and taking case studies from around the globe, the authors demonstrate that hospitals and asylums could be remarkably permeable institutions.
Baseler explains how British and colonial officials and landowners lured settlers from rival nations with promises of religious toleration, economic opportunity, and the "rights of Englishmen," and she identifies the liberties, disabilities, and benefits experienced by different immigrant groups. She also explains how the exploitation of slaves subsidized the living standards of Europeans who came by choice.
Geller and Harris's accompanying history of both societal and psychiatric standards for women reveals that often even the prevailing conventions reinforced the perception that these women were "mad.".
On May 8th, 1889, Vincent Van Gogh was admitted to a mental asylum near St.-Remy-de-Provence where he remained as a voluntary patient until May the following year. Throughout the year, Van Gogh enjoyed a continuous dialogue with his brother about his art, his mental condition, his hopes and ambitions, and from time to time his despair and sense of failure. The asylum year saw Vincent at his most raw and needy, but also at his most creative - turning out the equivalent of a masterpiece a day. This book offers an account, month by month, of that crucial penultimate chapter in Van Gogh s life. It is separated from the other chapters in the artist s life because although treated in all the numerous biographies it is none the less a self-contained episode, a play within a play, with a shape and dynamic of its own. Van Gogh s asylum year is unlike any other year in the long history of art."
