ABSTRACT
In this chapter we are concerned with the question of whether psychiatric hospitals have provided refuge in any sense during the twentieth century. In 1990, as a result of our involvement in an evaluation of two large psychiatric hospital closures in the London region, Friern and Claybury, and of being able to obtain ready access to patients’ case notes, we conceived a small-scale empirical study to address this question. We aimed to concentrate on two kinds of use of the hospitals as refuges, involving attempts to seek sanctuary in them, on the one hand, and attempts to withstand efforts to be resettled from them into the community on the other. In order to look at the latter kind of use in particular, we resolved at an early stage to focus on a small number of patients (twenty-three) who were quite remarkable in that they had each, at the time our study began, been continuously resident at one or other of the two hospitals for a staggering period of more than sixty years. We were interested in the experiences of this group because of our suspicion that these patients were more likely than any others to have used the hospital, at least after first becoming securely domiciled within it, as a place of refuge or sanctuary. This was on the grounds of our feeling that members of the group must have clung, at times almost tenaciously, to their hospital abodes, despite the best efforts of successive rehabilitators over the period from the 1930 Mental Treatment Act, which introduced voluntary admissions, to decarcerate patients and to resettle all those capable of being settled in the community. The sheer quantity of reviews of their status and prospects, as compared with patient groups having lesser lengths of stay and having been admitted more recently, seemed certain to provide an excellent source of data for empirical evaluation of the asylum function.
