Recycling Psychiatric Hospitals - Stigma & Selective Remembrance

Summarised from
Joseph, Alun E, Robin A Kearns, Graham Moon. "Recycling former psychiatric hospitals in New Zealand: Echoes of deinstitutionalisation and restructuring." Health & Place 12 (March 2009): 79-87.
((my comments in italics))

"The built environment abounds with elements that evoke memories, whether personal or collective. While other people are likely to be oblivious to places that are sites of personal significance (due, for example, to instances of trauma or celebration in times past), sites of collective memory are more likely to be kept ‘on the map’ by various means. Sites of collective remembrance may be complete buildings or ruins on the ‘heritage circuit’ travelled by tourists, or the more strategically preserved—and often politically contested—remnants of events or even purpose-built memorials (Marshall, 2004).  ...

Compared, for instance, to war memorials (McLean and Phillips, 1990), closed psychiatric hospitals are unlikely to be sufficiently prominent in the national consciousness to warrant systematic treatment or memorialisation in situ. Indeed, in the New Zealand context, the names of closed hospitals arguably loom larger in the collective memory than do the sites themselves. By way of example, names like ‘Tokanui’, ‘Sunnyside’, ‘Seacliff’, ‘Cherry Farm’, ‘Porirua’ and ‘Lake Alice’, which derive from locality names, are widely associated with now-closed facilities (see Fig. 1). Yet actually locating such abandoned sites is far from easy, with few signposts and minimal reference on maps. To an extent, therefore, we can say that institutional names are prominent markers in themselves. In cases such as the former Carrington Hospital in Auckland ... renaming (in this case from Carrington Technical Institute to Unitec) was, in effect, a re-branding that arguably attempted to sever the re-used buildings from their institutional heritage."

... While successfully rehabilitating (some) patients has not been easy, neither has rehabilitating the buildings they occupied. One explanation relates to the physical and symbolic distance of some asylums from centres of economic and social activity." 

The closure of rural psychiatric hospitals could be seen as part of a continuum of closures related to economic and social restructuring in New Zealand generally - for example, schools and banks, post offices - all just memories in many rural communities now. 

In each of these cases, the rural communities have been left with closed, yet purpose-built, infrastructure—sites which were formerly places of employment, rich symbolism and community interaction. As such, closures have been variably resisted and re-uses (e.g., a bank as a community centre; a post office as a café) have involved a preservation of heritage. 

Other examples of how former psychiatric hospitals have been used since closure:

• Chaplin and Peters (2003) surveyed 71 hospitals in six areas of England to determine the proportion of hospitals still open and the fate of those that had closed. Of the 53 (75%) closed hospitals, 14 sites included derelict buildings. Interestingly, property developers often deployed adjectives in their advertising—such as ‘seclusion’ and ‘sanctuary’—that could be applied to earlier uses. Yet explicit reference to the former psychiatric uses was only made in a small minority of cases, “possibly reflecting the stigma of their former existence”. According to the authors, “paradoxically, asylum can now be bought in an ideal self-contained community, with security to keep society out” (Chaplin and Peters, 2003, p. 228).

The distinction of a heritage appearance can possibly over-ride the stigma of direct association with psychiatric detention (Chaplin and Peters, 2003). 

Kingseat Hospital

Kingseat was a major expression of the expansion of New Zealand's mental health treatment capacity after WWII while its rural setting in part reflected the desire for seclusion reminiscent of Victorian ideals ((but also probably the idea that nature provided a healing environment)). In accordance with the standards of the time, the hospital was built as a series of villas catering to different patient groups (by sex and diagnosis, and eventually also by age). The villas were markedly larger than those built in the same period at Seaview, and the location of the hospital in a prosperous agricultural area and its large estate meant that the hospital's staff and patients produced much of their own food. By the outbreak of WW II, the hospital had eight villas and a total patient capacity of 400 and by 1946 patient numbers approached 900. Employment levels increased along with patient numbers, approaching 200 by the early 1950s, a distinctly higher staff to patient ratio than at Seaview.

After closure in 1996 and subsequent sale, it was announced in 2005 that “One of New Zealand's notorious former psychiatric hospitals will become the home of a horror show. A haunted house is set to open next week in the old nurses’ home at the former Kingseat Hospital at Karaka, south of Auckland” (New Zealand Herald, 22-10-2005). The same article went on to note that “The company is aware of the potential for accusations of bad taste by choosing a former psychiatric hospital, where many experienced mental suffering and some patients say they were mistreated. ‘That's why we’ve got it in the nurses’ home and not the actual hospital itself.’ ‘Spookers’ manager Julia Watson said ‘We also will be having absolutely nothing to do with a mental asylum’.” Other views have been aired. In her regular column in Canvas magazine, Daya Willis (2005, p. 10) wrote that “while there are undoubtedly excellent arguments for the old Kingseat Hospital grounds being put to use after all these years, there's also something creepy—something downright disrespectful, methinks—about running a fake scare-athon out of a property that saw so many people live through real horrors.”

The authors of the research paper concluded by stating that "Future work might also examine the conversion of former psychiatric hospitals into either educational facilities or luxury housing developments. We see in the former, epitomised by the Unitec students’ branding of their (former Carrington Hospital) campus as ‘Looneytec’ (McKechnie, 2004), the potential for the active re-imagining of the mental hospital."

Summarised from
Kearns, Robin, Alun E Joseph, Graham Moon. "Traces of the New Zealand psychiatric hospital: Unpacking the place of stigma." New Zealand Geographer 68, Issue 3 (Dec 2012): 175-186.

In this research article, the authors investigated the 'trancendent role of stigma in shaping the cultural traces of the psychiatric hosptial...' They noted a number of factors served to influence the filter of this stigma:
(1) locality - in communities immediately adjacent to former hospitals, memories of past use are very much alive, and have a degree of affection. Developers often find allies in local communities if it's felt that the development will deal with the often derelict sites and the ill ease associated with abandoned buildings.

At sites where mental health facilities remain, it could be argued that continued psychiatric services are a graphic form of rememberance (eg. Porirua)...though reuse is often  involve a deliberate manipulation of reputation and distancing from the past. An exception is Spookers in Kingseat...

See also:
Joseph, Alun E. Robin Kearns, Graham Moon. "Re-Imagining Psychiatric Asylum Spaces through Residential Redevelopment: Strategic Forgetting and Selective Remembrance." Housing Studies 28 (Jan 2013): 135-153.