Near the small village of Gartcosh, located in the northeastern quadrant of the greater Glasgow conurbation, there is an imposing two-towered gothic building that used to serve as the Main Administration Building of Gartloch Hospital. Surrounded by a fence, designed to keep people out, rather than to keep them in, its windows are either broken or boarded up. Inside, what is left of the floors is strewn with detritus, ranging from broken bits of furniture and torn curtains to crumbling plaster and bent nails. It is only when one looks up to the elaborate arched and buttressed ceiling, painted in shades of aquamarine, scarlet and vermillion, that a hint of the former grandeur of the place becomes apparent. Established in 1896 by the City of Glasgow and District Lunacy Board, Gartloch Hospital was one of dozens of Scottish psychiatric institutions built between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century. It would exist for exactly 100 years, typically housing between 500 and 800 patients. Although it functioned primarily as a psychiatric facility for the city's poor, as with similar institutions, it also served other functions, including a tuberculosis sanitaria soon after it opened, and as an Emergency Medical Services hospital during the First World War. Just prior to its closure in 1996, it was used as the set of the BBC drama Takin' Over the Asylum, starring Ken Stott and David Tennant. The passage of time, alongside a renewed interest in heritage and a consequent newfound appreciation for these buildings' architectural qualities, has paved the way 2 for redevelopment of these sites, slowly disentangling their architectural form from their erstwhile function. 1 Today, as with many former psychiatric hospitals, some of the former buildings at Gartloch have been converted into luxury apartments, and the grounds are being transformed into a housing estate. On the website for Gartloch Village, ironically described as being 'far from maddening crowd', the developers mention that a hospital was built here in 1896 (and 'immediately hailed as a Victorian architectural masterpiece'), but fail to mention its numerous psychiatric patients, focussing instead on its role treating 'returning war heroes'. 2 This approach is echoed in other asylum redevelopment projects. Friern Hospital, which opened to pauper patients in 1851 as Colney Hatch Asylum and at one time was England's largest asylum, closed in 1993. It reopened in 1995 as Princess Park Manor, a self-contained luxury housing development marketed as somewhere that you 'never need to leave'. A

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Aim of the SeriesCovering all historical periods and geographical contexts, the series explores how mental illness has been understood, experienced, diagnosed, treated and contested. It will publish works that engage actively with contemporary debates related to mental health and, as such, will be of interest not only to historians, but also mental health professionals, patients and policy makers. With its focus on mental health, rather than just psychiatry, the series will endeavour to provide more patient-centred histories. Although this has long been an aim of health historians, it has not been realised, and this series aims to change that.The scope of the series is kept as broad as possible to attract good quality proposals about all aspects of the history of mental health from all periods. The series emphasises interdisciplinary approaches to the fi eld of study, and encourages short titles, longer works, collections, and titles which stretch the boundaries of academic publishing in new ways.

The end of World War II and the Civil War (1946–1949) found a great section of the population of Greece struggling with serious economic and social problems, while the next two decades witnessed important socio-economic and cultural changes. Within this context, a group of mental health professionals claimed that their mission was not limited to the treatment of the mentally ill. They founded the Centre for Mental Health and Research and argued that ‘mental hygiene’ could improve the lives of all, relieve social problems and contribute to the modernisation and democratisation of society. During the late 1950s and the 1960s they sought to apply this vision not only in mental health but also in welfare services, the Social Aid Stations in Athens, Piraeus, Thessaloniki and Patrai. The Stations’ clientele originated from the less privileged social strata of these cities and surrounding villages, and requested material and practical assistance, and to a lesser extent, help with emotional and interpersonal problems. Based on unexplored case material, and building on existing literature on social psychiatry and mental hygiene, this paper addresses the gap in our knowledge of the history of mental health-cum-welfare services. It argues that the Stations envisioned and implemented an original combination of mental health and social welfare, which in the late 1950s was perceived as matching the needs and potential of the Greek population, while offering an ideal vehicle for the dissemination of mental hygiene. However, by the mid-1960s the Stations started to focus on mental health, and in the late 1960s the Athens and Patrai Stations were closed down, and the Thessaloniki and Piraeus Stations were turned into Social Psychiatry Services. This paper follows and interprets the shift from psychosocial welfare to social psychiatry, taking into consideration the transformations of Greek society, the specificities of the Stations’ operation and the profile and intentions of the Centre of Mental Health and Research. It asserts that the history of the Stations is significant in helping us understand and rethink the uneasy relationship between the social and the psychological in mental healthcare and social welfare.

In 1980, the first formal association of mental patients, their relatives, and mental health professionals was founded in Athens, Greece. The Motion for the Rights of the “Mentally Ill” proposed a total restructuring of mental health care and a novel conceptualization of mental illness. On the one hand, it demanded that the mental health system be based on open services, psychotherapy, and on patients’ active participation in all decisions concerning their treatment and life. On the other hand, it conceptualized mental illness as a political issue that concerned all. Thus, the Motion viewed the promotion of the rights of the mentally ill as part of a broader project of cultivating conscious, active, and collective citizenship. This paper traces the Motion’s history during the 1980s, showing that it was shaped by both the socio-political conditions of Greece in the post-dictatorship period, a time of intense politicization, and by the legacy of mental patient activism in the Western world during the 1970s and 1980s. It argues that, although the Motion had a limited long-term impact, it represented the mental patient movement in Greece as it furthered the latter’s main features, most importantly its twofold endeavor to change not only the mental health system and the attitudes towards mental illness, but also society.