#locked wards

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Some Personal Thoughts on the Locked Doors of Psychiatric Wards.

Some Personal Thoughts on the Locked Doors of Psychiatric Wards.

By Dr David Laing Dawson

In the late 1960’s through the 1970’s I was one of many who worked to unlock the doors of psychiatric wards. We were, after all, highly influenced by the idealism of those years. And to a large degree we succeeded. At least here and there. At least until this century when they began to be locked again.

Suicide was never the main concern. An actively suicidal inpatient had…

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Locked wards

Now look at this: a common room, a sitting room: hard to place, exactly. Is it a common room? A waiting room? Note the tissues by the window, white against the radiator. And squinch your eyes to look beyond the windows at the fence. It rises in strands, then slopes back in barbs above you. This is a locked ward (though it wasn't being run as a locked ward when I was there). I didn't take the photo in the Clinic in the Alps, but much further east, above a long lake in winter.

If it had been locked, this would be the rec area, cold and bleak as the twilight outside (but hey: you'd be too ill to notice it):

And this is the breakfast area. (This is what I mean when I say that being ill in Switzerland teaches you nothing about the experience of Anglo-Saxon psychiatry):