The Last Asylum

Barbara Taylor

4 ideas

1. A historian's years inside Friern Hospital

   In the late 1980s, historian Barbara Taylor suffered a severe breakdown marked by anxiety, drinking and self-harm, alongside a long psychoanalysis. She became a patient at Friern Hospital in north London, formerly Colney Hatch, the huge Victorian county asylum that opened in 1851. She moved between ward, day hospital and shared supported housing just before Friern closed in 1993 and was converted into luxury flats, so she lived through the asylum's final years as a patient and later wrote its history as a scholar.

2. Asylum closure removed refuge as well as confinement

   The closure of the asylums under care in the community was framed as liberation from custodial institutions, but it also removed a place of shelter, routine and ready-made company for people unable to cope alone. Patients discharged to bedsits and thinly staffed services often exchanged locked wards for isolation and neglect. Policy dismantled the institution's harms without rebuilding what it had, however imperfectly, provided.

3. Recovery can require permission to depend

   Taylor argues that she got better partly because the hospital and her long analysis let her be dependent for a long time, and she did not have to perform independence before she could manage it. A mental health culture that treats self-sufficiency as the goal from the first day, and treats reliance as failure or cost, cuts off the regression and holding that some people need before they can function again. Independence is presented as an outcome that dependency makes possible, and not its opposite.

4. Asylum as sanctuary and prison at once

   The history of the asylum should not be read only as a story of horror, and it should not be romanticized either. Institutions like Colney Hatch began with humane Victorian ideals of moral treatment. Overcrowding and underfunding turned them into custodial warehouses, yet they still kept pockets of real care and community. Holding both readings together means asking what an institution offers the people inside it, not only what it does to them.

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