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

Seeking to align psychiatric practice with general medicine following the inauguration of the National Health Service, psychiatric hospitals in post-war Britain deployed new treatments designed to induce somatic change, such as ECT, leucotomy and sedatives. Advocates of these treatments, often grouped together under the term 'physical therapies', expressed relief that the social problems encountered by patients could now be interpreted as symptomatic of underlying biological malfunction rather than as a cause of disorder that required treatment. Drawing on the British Journal of Psychiatric Social Work, this article analyses the critique articulated by psychiatric social workers based within hospitals who sought to facilitate the social reintegration of patients following treatment. It explores the development of 'psychiatric social treatment', an approach devised by psychiatric social workers to meet the needs of people with enduring mental health problems in hospital and community settings that sought to alleviate distress and improve social functioning by changing an individual's social environment and interpersonal relationships. 'Physical' and 'social' models of psychiatric treatment, this article argues, contested not only the aetiology of mental illness but also the nature of care, treatment and cure.

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This article examines Scottish provision of psychiatric care in the 1960s and 1970s. It demonstrates that institutional services did not rapidly disappear across the UK following the Ministry of Health's decision to shut down psychiatric hospitals in 1961, and highlights Scotland's distinctive trajectory. Furthermore, it contends that psychiatric hospitals developed new approaches to assist patients in this era, thereby contributing towards the transformation of post-war psychiatric practice. Connecting a discussion of policy with an analysis of provision, it examines the Department of Health for Scotland's cautious response to the Ministry's embrace of deinstitutionalization, before analysing Glasgow's psychiatric provision in the 1970s. At this point the city boasted virtually no community-based services, and relied heavily on its under-resourced and overburdened hospitals. Closer analysis dispels any impression of stagnation, revealing how ideologies of deinstitutionalization transformed institutional care.