An anonymous room in a medical institution. A man in a white lab coat ticks off items on his clipboard. A woman in a sweater and culottes beckons the subject to sit down on a moulded plastic chair, and offers a pair of headphones. A rack of electronic equipment, consisting of industrial signal generators and amplifiers, lies behind them. The subject is blindfolded, then a red floodlight is directed at his eyes, and a soundtrack of pure white and pink noise – what we call static, the random spread of frequencies you hear when the TV set isn’t tuned in to a signal – is sent through the headphones. 
The experimenters hope the subject will discern a pattern through the noise, perhaps make out the faint trace of human voices. This is perhaps closer to para-psychology than classical psychiatry, but it is one of many techniques tried out in asylums for the insane over many decades during the last century. Their names changed many times, from asylums for the insane, to idiot colonies, then mental hospitals, and psychiatric units: as did their methods. From the more conventional approaches like work therapy and bed rest for nervous exhaustion, to the more extreme, such as the 1960’s practice of dosing patients with powerful drugs like chlorpromazine, seconal and largactil.
Further back in the 1940’s, some patients were hooked up to a Page-Russell machine, which carried out electro-convulsive therapy by applying jolts of electricity to the brain, in order to break up patterns of behaviour which the specialists decided were detrimental to the patient’s wellbeing. ECT had irreversible side-effects, summed up by Ernest Hemingway, who received electro-shock therapy in 1961 – “Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.” Even more extreme, and horrific in liberal modern terms, was the leucotomy or lobotomy, which involved surgery on the brain’s frontal lobes. As there is already lurid speculation in the media about ECT and leucotomy procedures, I will leave it there and concentrate instead on the environment of the asylums themselves.
My interest lies in the homogeneous visual and audio environment known as the Ganzfeld, or "total field”, and in the buildings which housed these experiments with peoples’ psyches. To quieten down the "noise" produced by internal bodily tension (the high note of our nerves, the steady pulse of the heart, and perhaps the hiss of tinnitus), the patient was led through a set of relaxation exercises at the beginning of the Ganzfeld period. The aim was also to tune out the background noise of everyday life, because “psi” information can be a very weak signal. Accordingly, it was important that background noise in the asylums was kept down, and that the buildings were a calm environment.
The separation of asylums from the rest of the population is obvious: most lie in rural locations a few miles from the cities they were built to serve. Arguably that provided a peaceful context for the patients, ample room to expand the buildings, and for the patients to exercise in – and possibly some reassurance for the “man and woman in the street” that the disturbed patients posed little risk to their orderly lives. Little do many realise that sanity is not a given, and that the line between sanity and insanity is not black and white, but a fuzzy one across which many of us drift at some point, whether through sorrow, anger or confusion. As with most things in life, you show far more sympathy towards a condition if someone you know has been touched by it.
Some Victorian-era asylums, such as Gartloch outside Glasgow, were imposingly gothic in atmosphere (with a small “g”), and are guaranteed to trigger thoughts of institutional architecture. The dark brooding towers cast the long shadow of The System over both patients and staff, and are inescapable from anywhere on site. However, by the time the Edwardians had developed the asylum, they concluded that the “pavillion” or “colony” plan, which split a single echelon-plan building down into smaller ward blocks, was more sympathetic to the patients. Likewise, the grounds they laid out around the newer asylums, such as Talgarth in the Black Mountains, or St Mary’s outside Newcastle, were on a more humane scale and were not surrounded by high walls.
Today, many of these old institutions have closed, as a result of the “Care in the Community” programme – and I find it telling that the buildings have come to take on their own Ganzfeld characteristics. Like the Surrealists’ hobby of “automatic writing”, the Ganzfeld procedure offers scope to discern faint signals amongst the noise of architectural sub-conscious, perhaps creating something new from a real or imaginary cue. It also harks back to Edison’s attempts to hear the voices of the dead via the radio, his optimistic hope that new technology might reveal hidden worlds. While the buildings stand empty, awaiting redevelopment or demolition, they have lost part of their personality, and become an empty vessel into which we can read different things.
By listening closely, perhaps the developers and architects can sense what to keep, what could be incorporated into the new, and which parts of the troubled past could be jettisoned. It is one thing to convert a T.B. Sanatorium into flats, once you’re convinced that the germ has been sterilised and drugged out of existence; it’s something quite different to break all the associations these asylums have, for their former patients and staff. While they are standing empty, the old asylums are peaceful places, and the best of them are the rural ones like Talgarth or St Mary’s. The untended landscaping has begun to close in on itself, cloistering the buildings in bushes and trees; birds and foxes slip in through the gaps and cracks which have opened up in the walls. They have lost any associations of menace they may once have had.
Without access to vast numbers of NHS files (which, due to patient confidentiality, the authorities have become very possessive of – rather than the old laissez-faire approach of dumping un-shredded paperwork into skips as allegedly happened years ago) it’s difficult to tell which asylums carried out which therapies – but most used powerful psycho-active drugs, many tried seclusion rooms and padded cells as a restraint for violent patients, and some experimented with ECT. There is little trace remaining of those once the NHS leaves the building; but it’s still easy to close your eyes and experience the Ganzfeld. A deserted asylum is, paradoxically, one of few places where you might find peace – partly because it’s empty, but also because each building is straining to make out the faint signal which will determine its future.
For a more systematic discussion of asylums and their development, have a look at the County Asylums website, and for a beautifully elegiac description of these institutions in their current state, I recommend taking the time to read Mechanised, which is one of the very best of the sites devoted to the subject. Neither website was produced by an architectural writer, and they are all the better for that.
