Introduction

This chapter reconsiders the importance of psychiatric spaces within the wider history of mental illness. With each wave of reform from the late eighteenth century onwards, a modified version of psychiatric space was embraced as the final answer, while the history of previous spatial solutions to insanity was rewritten, caricaturing these solutions as crude, irrational, and unsuccessful. In many respects, the spatial and architectural contexts of psychiatry and mental illness are related to those of medicine more generally. Since the 1960s, the policy embraced in large parts of the western world of closing large public asylums and replacing them with ‘care in the community’, has reinforced the public perception of separate, contained spaces for mental illness as undifferentiated black holes for society’s unwanted. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.