ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book uses the term psychiatric asylum, which people contend to be neutral but meaningful. It conveys the focus of the institutions and their underlying philosophy. For preference, we refer to people with mental health problems as the users of these facilities. During an era of closure spanning the decades since the 1960s, with temporal epicentres varying by country, the psychiatric asylum was, at once, characterised as outmoded and ill-suited to the needs of contemporary health care and stigmatised as a site of patient abuse. Key characteristics of the idea of the psychiatric asylum included the notion of potential recovery in an ordered, secluded and generally rural environment away from the social stresses of an emerging industrial urbanised society. England provides some idea of the eventual extent of the network of state-provided psychiatric asylums and the scale of constituent institutions.
