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Author: Barbara Taylor
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-04-15
Total Pages: 316
ISBN-13: 022627392X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 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
Author: Barbara Taylor
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-04-15
Total Pages: 316
ISBN-13: 022627408X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBlending personal memoir with social history, the author shares an “exquisitely written and provocative” account of mental illness and care (Sunday Times, UK). In the late 1970s, Barbara Taylor, then an acclaimed young historian, began to suffer from severe anxiety. Eventually, her struggles led her to be admitted to the infamous Friern Mental Hospital in North London—once known as the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. The Last Asylum is a candid account of her time there, and probing look at the evolution of mental health treatment. Taylor was admitted to Friern in 1988, not long before England’s asylum system began to undergo dramatic change. The 1990s saw the old asylums shuttered, their patients left to navigate a perpetually overcrowded and underfunded mental health system. But Taylor contends that the emptying of the asylums also marked a bigger loss—a loss of community. Taylor credits her own recovery to the help of a steadfast psychoanalyst and a circle of friends, including Magda, her manic-depressive roommate, and Fiona, who shared stories of her boyfriend, the “Spaceman”. The support and trust of that network was crucial to Taylor’s recovery, offering a respite from the “stranded, homeless feelings” she and others found in the outside world.
Author: Graham Moon
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-03
Total Pages: 208
ISBN-13: 1317045394
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe 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.
Author: Christopher Payne
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Published: 2009-09-04
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 0262013495
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPowerful 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.”
Author: Mab Segrest
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2021-04-14
Total Pages: 355
ISBN-13: 1620972980
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"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.
Author: Mark Stevens
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2014-10-30
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 1473842387
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA vivid portrait of the day-to-day experience in the public asylums of nineteenth-century England, by the bestselling author of Broadmoor Revealed. Life in the Victorian Asylum reconstructs the lost world of nineteenth-century public asylums. This fresh take on the history of mental health reveals why county asylums were built, the sort of people they housed, and the treatments they received, as well as the enduring legacy of these remarkable institutions. Mark Stevens, a professional archivist, and expert on asylum records, delves into Victorian mental health hospital documents to recreate the experience of entering an asylum and being treated there—perhaps for a lifetime. Praise for Broadmoor Revealed “Superb.” —Family Tree magazine “Detailed and thoughtful.” —Times Literary Supplement “Paints a fascinating picture.” —Who Do You Think You Are? magazine
Author: Herman Charles Merivale
Publisher: DigiCat
Published: 2022-09-15
Total Pages: 77
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is an enlightening memoir by Herman Merivale, where he narrated his time in one of England's countryside asylums in the 1860s. He was suffering from depression and was taken into care for treatment. Throughout the work, Merivale attacked over-treatment and suggested that being in the asylum during that period could drive someone into insanity even if they were completely normal.
Author: Erving Goffman
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-08
Total Pages: 426
ISBN-13: 1351327747
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA 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.
Author: Patrick McGrath
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2011-01-05
Total Pages: 269
ISBN-13: 0307764443
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPatrick McGrath has created his most psychologically penetrating vision to date: a nightmare world rocked to its foundations by a passion of such force and intensity that it shatters the lives--and minds--of all who are touched by it. Stella Raphael, a woman of great beauty and formidable intelligence, is married to Max, a staid and unimaginative forensic psychiatrist. Max has taken a job in a huge top-security mental hospital in rural England, and Stella, far from London society, finds herself restless and bored. Into her lonely existence comes Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor confined to the hospital after killing his wife in a psychotic rage. He comes to Stella's garden to rebuild an old Victorian conservatory there, and Stella cannot ignore her overwhelming physical attraction to this desperate man. Their explosive affair pits them against Stella's husband, her child, and the entire institution. When the crisis comes to a head, Stella makes a decision--one that will destroy several lives and precipitate an appalling tragedy that could only be fueled by illicit sexual love. Asylum is a terrifying exploration of the extremes to which erotic obsession can drive us. Patrick McGrath brings his own dazzling blend of cool artistry and visceral engagement to this mesmerizing story of a fatal love and its unspeakably tragic aftermath. And in Stella Raphael, a woman who tears down the walls of her constricted existence to pursue a dangerous passion, he has created a character who will long be remembered for her willingness to take the ultimate risk, even if she must pay the ultimate price.
Author: Madeleine Roux
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2013-08-20
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13: 0062220985
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMadeleine 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!
