Designing for Mental Health: Psychiatry, Psychology and the Architectural Study Project

Edmund Ramsden

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-98699-9_10

Abstract

Abstract In 1953 the American Psychiatric Association established an Architectural Study Project in collaboration with the American Institute of Architects. The project brought together a wide range of experts from psychiatry and the behavioural sciences and the planning and design professions to provide solutions to the ailing mental hospital system in North America. They began to focus attention on various aspects of the hospital environment, such as light, colour and the creation of spaces for privacy and social contact, in ways that would go on to influence theories, methods and designs far beyond the walls of the institution. This paper will explore the contribution of the mental hospital, as both laboratory and field site, to the development of the new field of environmental psychology which attended to the function and design of a range of city spaces to prevent mental illness and promote mental health in a period of urban crisis.

Highlights

In historical reflections on the architecture of the mental hospital, there is a familiar narrative arc.[1]. This runs from an optimistic era of moral treatment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which informed the designs of those such as Thomas Kirkbride that the hospital should be light, spacious and connected to nature, to one of intense pessimism in the twentieth, with damning exposés and critical ethnographies of the mental hospital that used personal accounts and participant observation
The mental hospital becomes an intensely problematic space due, in part, to its physical features such as its geographical isolation from the world, designs for confinement and surveillance, depressing wards and crowded dormitories. It is seen as a site of perpetual conflict between disciplines and communities, such as psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and social and behavioural scientists, the latter gaining their institutional strength and legitimacy from the university, rather than the mental hospital which was increasingly questioned as a locus of research and care.[4]
Together with the emergence of new drugs and therapies, this criticism contributed to the opening-up of psychiatric services from the 1950s with the emergence of community care legislation, the growth of psychiatric units in general hospitals and the establishment of new buildings such as Community Mental Health Centres to better integrate different therapies and communities, rehabilitate patients and prevent mental illness

Summary

Introduction

In historical reflections on the architecture of the mental hospital, there is a familiar narrative arc.[1]. This runs from an optimistic era of moral treatment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which informed the designs of those such as Thomas Kirkbride that the hospital should be light, spacious and connected to nature, to one of intense pessimism in the twentieth, with damning exposés and critical ethnographies of the mental hospital that used personal accounts and participant observation

Ramsden (*) Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

10 DESIGNING FOR MENTAL HEALTH

Conclusion