Opening Up and Closing Down: Notes on the End of an Asylum

Abstract

Deinstitutionalisation describes the process in which, throughout the western world, psychiatric hospitals discharged most of their patients and most often closed their doors. It coincided with an influential rethinking of the status of the mentally ill as citizens. At Wolston Park Hospital, Queensland's first and major psychiatric facility, opened in 1865, this was an extended process beginning in the 1930s that ended only in 2001. This paper considers how this happened, over what period of time, and with what kinds of impact on the institutional community. It makes use of oral histories collected among those who worked at the hospital as well as those who were its patients and clients.