Goffman ‘Asylums’ – The Moral Career of the Mental Patient

The Psychiatric tradition of hospitalizing mental patients is often viewed by society as an attempt to treat someone with a psychiatric illness that may pose a danger to himself/others and is generally in the best interests of the patient, with the aim of recovery/treatment. In this view, the mental hospital is a helping/therapeutic institution. Based on Goffmans (1959) qualitative observations of life in a mental institution, he challenged the idea that the Psychiatric approach to mental illness through hospitalization was a positive/helping experience for the majority of patients (at least for some of the time) and instead claimed it could produce even more problematic behaviour and counter-therapeutic states (at least in the short term)….(short extract)