Across the water: reviewing geographical studies of asylums and other mental health facilities

It is possible now to identify a small field of geographical studies exploring how space, place, environment and landscape are bound up in the worlds of people experiencing mental health problems. Some of these studies take seriously the institutions which have been provided to shelter, control, care for and even cure such people, and this interest has often touched upon the rise of the 'asylums' in Europe and North America (chiefly as an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century phenomenon). This paper surveys the geographical literature tackling asylums and other mental health facilities, and then offers an interpretation of the theoretical claims and substantive research undertaken in this respect by Michael Dear and various co-workers. Running through the paper is an argument about the need for studies of 'asylum geographies' to be attentive to what Gunnar Olsson terms 'ontological transformations' between thoughts and things. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd