ABSTRACT
High-rise housing represents one specific and important case in which the general relationship of the environment to mental health needs to be examined scientifically. This is far from easy, though, because every aspect of the subject is immensely complex, while up to now social psychiatry has failed either to construct a credible environmental offshoot or to demonstrate that it can intervene usefully in public issues of this kind. For their part, planners, architects and others whose decisions affect the fabric of people’s lives have shown little interest in looking at the long-term human effects of their activities – a task which for psychiatrists is considered to be one of the basic tools of the craft.
