Mental Hospital – beyond the City Borders and the Limits of Imagination

Abstract

The research, conducted at the Dr. J. Babinski Clinical Hospital in Krakow - Kobierzyn, investigates how the psychiatric hospital is perceived by city residents. In this paper, the research question is which borders were spotted by the participants. The way of talking about them, creating meanings, was analyzed. The research process consisted of a questionnaire and a walk through the hospital's green area, visiting an exhibition and a group interview, as well as a separate session which included the mapping of the respondents' feelings on the hospital's plan. The implementation of qualitative and action methods served to explore issues familiar from sociological research on social distance toward people with mental illness. Another innovation was to invite the participants to the public park space of the psychiatric hospital and conduct most of the research there. This influenced the way they talked about boundaries and domesticating space. The statements by the participants described the boundaries between the city and the hospital, the frontiers and the borderlands of the hospital as such, the problem of the indistinguishability of the boundary between the hospital and other places and between the sick and the healthy, the internal boundaries of the hospital and the boundary of the disease. These boundaries were both tangible and intangible. Even physical barriers were given metaphorical meaning. The most difficult to overcome were the limits of imagination and illness, according to the respondents. Overcoming the physical boundaries, i.e., visiting the park and the hospital complex, and the exhibition about the process of illness and recovery, in their opinion, resulted in taming the space of the psychiatric hospital.