Hospital in the Mind

A frank participatory oral history profile of a unique psychiatric hospital. Patients and staff relate extraordinary recoveries through the power of community and psychoanalysis.
For over a century the Cassel, an NHS hospital in south London, has been treating mentally disturbed people in a community setting. For most patients it is the last resort after a lifetime of locked wards and sedation. In this film, thirty patients and staff across more than sixty years present their lived experience of the journey out of the abyss.
Hospital in the Mind presents another way of dealing with mental illness. Not with drugs and confinement, but through the power of individual and group psychoanalytical therapy and, crucially, connected community living.
It represents a powerful alternative to the failed neoliberal solutions that have blighted Britain’s mentally ill for over a generation. And it remains an ever more important beacon of hope as our society continues to fragment and decay.
Featuring a hundred years of archive dating back to the hospital’s origins as a sanctuary for shellshocked veterans of World War One, the film charts its transformation into an NHS psychoanalytic in-patient facility treating people with Borderline Personality Disorder.
A participatory project in which all participants contributed to the filmmaking process. But the principal character is the Cassel itself, a place and a ‘model’ where people, many of them suicide survivors, can find a way to connect and live again.