Asylums by Erving Goffman

Asylums by Erving Goffman The word "asylum" was once commonly a synonym for a sanctuary or save haven from oppression. However, in his text entitled Asylums, Erving Goffman made it clear that such institutions were more often warehouses for the mentally ill or so-called mentally ill rather than places of refuge, much less mental rehabilitation. Goffman's persuasive and pervasive critique of the mental health institutionalization system of 'the asylum' led to the rapid de-institutionalization of mental patients in the era after he wrote his work, Asylums, in 1962.

Like the military, the process of inculcation in the rhythms of life of an mental institution are what Erving Goffman calls the processes of becoming socialized into the role of an inmate in a "Total Institution," where the institution becomes a part of the inmate's fragile sense of self, rather than simply the place where he or she resides.

(12-17) The characteristics of Total Institutions are particularly insidious in regards to mental institutions because although they supposedly are designed to cure or at least temper inmate pathology, as institutions themselves, mental institutions have pathological features in their procedural construction. As "Total Institutions" like prisons, they often cause pathological methods of living and dealing with life and building a self. For individuals with the most fragile sense of who they are as "selves" the institutionalization process into the asylum thus can be harrowing and self-defeating.

Total institutions are characterized by what the author entitles "batch living," for example, where the three spheres of home, work and play are collapsed into one, unlike those of normal, non-routine domestic life. Life in an asylum can be described as the antithesis of domestic living and also the antithesis of preparing inmates for reentering such a world and contributing to a prison-like atmosphere.

The total institution of the asylum is also characterized by what Goffman terms a structure of "binary management." Binary management means that the staff and the inmates live in essentially different areas, according to different rules, and thus in worlds. Again, this separation of binary management is analogous to a prison system, though inmates of asylums have (usually) committed no crimes. It is also characteristic of the military's separation of privates from officers, but in asylums there is no hope or help to rise up the hierarchy, eventually.

This asylum environment encourages the staff to feel superior or righteous in regards to their charges, while inmates are made to feel weak or inferior towards the binary management structure of surveillance, or at worst, guilty for their stigmatized medical and mental status. The inmate role as low in the hierarchy of binary management is taught starting with a highly ritualised admissions procedure to shape and code the person into the patient role.

Although the asylum is supposed to help the patient, the rituals teach the patient that he or she is lower than those who command the life of the patient. Thus, the.