The documentary #Unfit is the latest attempt to explain Trump’s destructive policies via psychology. This only ever causes more harm than good, especially for people with confirmed mental illnesses.
mental illness
How Psychiatry and Hallucinogenic Drugs Meet in Painting
The Bethlem Museum of the Mind’s latest exhibition Brilliant Visions: Mescaline, Art and Psychiatry plunges into the murky world of psychosis and psychedelics.
A Cartoonist’s Playful and Pragmatic Mental Health Guide
In the follow-up to her 2012 graphic memoir about bipolar disorder, Marbles, Ellen Forney offers practical strategies for achieving mental stability.
A 19th-Century Magic Lantern Designed to Quell Patients’ Delusions
In the mid-19th century, Philadelphia physician Thomas Story Kirkbride incorporated magic lantern slides into his “moral treatment” regimen at the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane.
Studying the Design of a 19th-Century Mental Asylum
An exhibition at the National Building Museum explores St. Elizabeths in Washington, DC, and the history of mental health architecture in the United States.
A Visual Record of Four Centuries of Asylum Care
Mike Jay’s book This Way Madness Lies explores society’s approach to mental illness over centuries.
The Belgian Town Where the Mentally Ill Are Part of the Community
The treatment of mental illness has often involved removing patients from society and placing them in their own institutions.
Photographs of Crumbling Asylums, Where Architecture Was Designed to Cure
Last October, the domed 19th-century building that stood as the centerpiece to New Jersey’s Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital was demolished.
Quiet Drawings from a Life Lost in Mental Institutions
In one of the drawings discovered in a well-worn album, fished out of the trash in 1970 by a teenager in Springfield, Missouri, a wide-eyed woman points to a bouquet of flowers below the words “ECTLECTRC PENCIL.”
Icelandic Scientists Find Link Between Creativity and Mental Disorders
There’s something strangely attractive about the stereotype of the crazy artist.
The Vanishing of America’s Historic Mental Asylums
Between 1848 and 1890, dozens of grand mental asylums were built around the United States under the Kirkbride Plan, designed by Thomas Story Kirkbride.
Bedlam’s New Museum Looks Beyond Madness
The name Bedlam is so evocative of chaos and madness, the real history of one of the world’s oldest institutions for the treatment of mental illness often gets detached from its public presence.