ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses about the study of a medium-secure forensic mental health ward in a part of Greater London. This is a ward where forensic psychiatric patients are often detained or sectioned for treatment under the mental health act. The institutional forgetting performed by the unit, then, appears to reach its point of maximum intensity in this constitution of a thoroughgoing interactional and corporeal displacement of the personal pasts of patients. The chapter explores an example of institutional forgetting that was enacted via the social topology of the ward, in terms of both its spatial and temporal complexity. Medication also heightens the stretching of temporal relations on the ward. The chapter shows how the reconfiguring of life-space occurs in the institutional assemblage, and explores the affordances of the physical setting of the ward. It also shows how the past becomes folded into the current system of monitoring behavioural and chemical indicators of well-being.
