ABSTRACT
The history of the asylum has dominated the historiography of psychiatry and mental health. This chapter characterises the rise and fall of these institutions as a story of perpetual reform efforts reflecting a fundamental and perhaps irreconcilable dilemma: how to make a carceral situation therapeutic. Drawing on both the key themes of this historiographical scholarship as well as more contemporary literature, this chapter also argues that despite the widespread closure of asylums during the era of deinstitutionalisation in the decades after the Second World War, prisons and aged facilities in the present day reproduce many of the paradoxes and depredations of the asylums of old.
