Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the mental hospital.
30
As discussed already, the traditional mental hospital had
a top-down power structure in which doctors gave orders to nurses who gave
orders to patients. Social psychiatry, in contrast, favored some measure of
bottom-up control. Patients and staff might meet as a group to discuss condi-
tions in the hospital or individual mental problems.
31
The Glasgow rumpus
room experiment can be seen as a radical early variant of this approach, and
one later development from the early sixties is particularly relevant here—
David Cooper's experimental psychiatric ward, Villa 21, at Shenley Hospital,
where patients were encouraged to take care of their surroundings and each
other. “The venture, while it lasted, was a modest success and many interest-
ing lessons were learnt,” but it ran into many of the same problems as had the
rumpus room before it: embedding this kind of a bottom-up structure within
a top-down institution created all sorts of problems and tensions, nicely
evoked in
Zone of the Interior
. Villa 21 and its inmates made the whole hospital
look untidy; the patients disrupted the orderly routines of the institution;
nurses feared for their jobs if the patients were going to look after themselves.
“Cooper concluded that any future work of this kind had to be done outside
the great institutions” (Kotowicz 1997, 78).
32
This gets us back to Laing. In 1965, Laing, Cooper, Aaron Esterson, Sidney
Briskin, and Clancy Sigal decided to found a therapeutic community entirely
outside the existing institutions of mental health care in Britain.
33
In April
1965, they established the Philadelphia Association as a registered charity
with Laing as chairman, and with the object of taking over, two months later,
a large building in the East End of London, Kingsley Hall, as the site for a
new kind of institution (Howarth-Williams 1977, 52).
34
Kingsley Hall itself
closed down in 1970, but the Philadelphia Association continued the project
into the 1970s with a series of therapeutic communities that moved between
condemned houses in Archway, north London. Life in these communities is
the best exemplification I know of what a symmetric cybernetic psychiatry
might look like in practice, and I therefore want to examine it in some de-
tail. The proviso is, alas, that documentary information is thin on the ground.
The only topic-length account of life at Kingsley Hall is Mary Barnes and Joe
Berke's
Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness
(1971), though
Zone of the
Interior
is illuminating reading. On Archway, the only written source is
The
David Burns Manuscript
(Burns 2002), written by one of the residents, un-
published but available online. There is also a documentary film made at one
of the Archway houses over a period of seven weeks in 1971,
Asylum
, by Peter
Robinson.
35
This lack of information is itself an interesting datum, given the
impressive amounts of time and emotional energy expended at Kingsley Hall
