Christopher Payne : Asylum. Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals

Text des Fotografen auf seiner Website:

https://www.chrispaynephoto.com/books-1

„We tend to think of mental hospitals as “snake pits”—places of nightmarish squalor and abuse—and this is how they have been portrayed in books and film. Few Americans, however, realize these institutions were once monuments of civic pride, built with noble intentions by leading architects and physicians, who envisioned the asylums as places of refuge, therapy, and healing. For more than half the nation’s history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, more than 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948 they housed over half a million patients. But over the next thirty years, with the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these massive buildings neglected and abandoned.“

Buchinfo:

Christopher Payne:
Asylum. Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals

Cambridge 2009, The MIT Press
ISBN 978-0-262-01349-9, HC mit fotoillustriertem Schutzumschlag
210 Seiten, zahlreiche Abbildungen in Farbe und S/W, 30,5 cm x 26,5 cm
enthält einen Essay von Oliver Sacks