Psychiatric Institutions and the Physical Environment: Combining Medical Architecture Methodologies and Architectural Morphology to Increase Our Understanding — Chrysikou 2019
The diversity of how psychiatric services have grown around the world has led to a wide range of policies, care models, building types, and experimental approaches. Even in newly built facilities, institutional behaviors remained because care was getting more complicated, there were still traces of institutions, there was a stigma, and psychiatric treatments weren't very good at diagnosing problems or helping people. This was brought up by research on psychiatric buildings that won awards. Two acute psychiatric wards in London were the places where the research was done. The SCP model, which was made to evaluate mental health facilities, was used to evaluate each one. This model shows the relationship between policy, care schedule, and patient-focused environment. Plans, visits, and interviews with both staff and patients were used to get the data. The results were compared to those of an earlier study that had used the same method. Also, a syntactic analysis was done to figure out how the layouts of wards fit into the social world. There could have been links between regimes, the way space was set up, and the way people lived together. Methodologies of architectural morphologies showed places that would attract people because of how they looked, not because of what they did. However, insights into medical architecture outlined institutional undercurrents and provided alternative interpretation to spatial analysis. Understanding the social structure of psychiatric facilities could be a challenge to the current model, which is based on surveillance, because psychosocial rehabilitation uses could be encouraged at places where people are more integrated.
Evangelia Chrysikou, "Psychiatric Institutions and the Physical Environment: Combining Medical Architecture Methodologies and Architectural Morphology to Increase Our Understanding", Journal of Healthcare Engineering, vol. 2019, Article ID 4076259, 16 pages, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/4076259
