Background: the therapeutic landscape perspective as a framework to assess psychiatric
hospital design
This paper explores the relevance of concepts of `therapeutic landscapes' for hospital
design (specifically in the psychiatric sector) and considers the links between models of
psychiatric care and the buildings within which care is provided. This study is therefore
situated at the intersection of debates summarised below in geography (concerning
therapeutic landscapes), in architecture and environmental psychology (concerning
hospital design), and in social psychiatry (concerning environments that are conducive
to different models of care).
Therapeutic landscapes in hospital design: a qualitative
assessment by staff and service users of the design of a new
mental health inpatient unit
Sarah Curtis
Department of Geography, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE, England;
e-mail: s.e.curtis@durham.ac.uk
Wil Gesler
Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, London E1 4NS, England;
e-mail: wgesler@aol.com
Kathy Fabian
Independent Newham Users Forum (Mental Health),
e-mail: staff@inuf.org
Susan Francis
NHS Confederation, England;
e-mail: Sue.Francis@nhsconfed.org
Stefan Priebe
Centre for Psychiatry, St. Bartholomews and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry,
Queen Mary, University of London, England; e-mail: s.priebe@qmul.ac.uk
Received 13 December 2005; in revised form 29 May 2006; published online 16 May 2007
Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 2007, volume 25, pages 591 ^ 610
Abstract. This pilot research project sought to provide a postoccupation assessment of a new mental
health inpatient unit in East London, built under the Private Finance Initiative scheme. Qualitative
discussion groups or unstructured interviews were used to explore the views of people who had
been service users (but were currently well) and of nursing staff and consultants working in the new
hospital. The participants gave their views on the aspects of the hospital which were beneficial
or detrimental to well-being and the reasons for their views. Informants discussed hospital design in
terms of: (1) respect and empowerment for people with mental illness; (2) security and surveillance
versus freedom and openness; (3) territoriality, privacy, refuge, and social interactions; (4) homeliness
and contact with nature; (5) places for expression and reaffirmation of identity, autonomy, and
consumer choice; and (6) integration into sustainable communities. Themes emerging from this
research were interpreted in light of ideas from geographical research on therapeutic landscapes
constituted as physical, social, and symbolic spaces, as well as research from environmental psychology.
The findings have practical implications for hospital design and underline the need to consider
empowerment of patients in decisions over hospital design. We note the challenges involved
in determining therapeutic hospital design given changing models of care in psychiatry, lack of
consensus over models of care, and the varying and somewhat conflicting requirements these imply
for the physical, social, and symbolic attributes of design of hospital spaces. We also note the
implications of our findings for an interpretation of therapeutic landscapes as contested spaces.
DOI:10.1068/c1312r
The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in England involves long-term contracts with
private companies to design, build, and often manage public facilities which are leased
by the public sector for the duration of the contract [for more details, see Department
of Health (2005) and, for a more critical discussion, see Atun and McKee (2005)]. This
has supported a new wave of National Health Service hospital construction, including
new psychiatric inpatient facilities, prompting renewed debate over hospital design that
is conducive to human wellbeing in the broad sense, as well as clinically efficient.
A number of authors, including geographers, have documented the development of
ideas about `therapeutic' settings for providing mental health care that reflect changing
social construction of mental illness advances in treatment models in psychiatry (for
example, Curtis, 2004; Dear, 2000; Dear and Taylor, 1982; Dear and Wolch, 1987;
Edginton, 1997; Furlong, 1996; Hughes, 2000; Jones, 1979; Milligan, 2000; Parr et al,
2003; Philo, 1989; Rogers and Pilgrim, 1996; Scull, 1979; C J Smith, 1977; 2000; Wolch
and Philo, 2000).
The recent trend in clinical strategies for care of mentally ill people has been
towards what Thornicroft and Tansella (2004) describe as a `pragmatic balance of
community and hospital care', aiming to support people with mental illness living in
the community as far as possible, rather than in institutions. Inpatient hospital facilities
are generally intended to offer care and treatment for acute phases of mental illness,
rather than long-term residential care. This contrasts with the older `asylum' model
of care and necessitates new approaches to design for psychiatric hospitals.
The current resurgence of interest in hospital design is also associated with work
in environmental psychology, including research on clinical outcomes, which demonstrates
the importance of hospital environments for treatment outcomes and the more
general wellbeing of patients (eg, see discussion in Ittelson et al, 1970; Lawson et al,
2003; Rothberg et al, 2005; Ulrich, 1997). Hospital design can also help to create
healthy workplaces and may affect staff recruitment, retention, and morale (for example,
reviewed by Gross et al, 1998). However, what aspects of design are important and how
they may be therapeutic is a contested domain (Reizenstein, 1982): NHS planners and
managers, architects, government ministers, staff, consultants, users, and other members
of the public may put forward differing ideas about therapeutic design.
We argue below that hospital design, especially as it relates to the social dimensions
of space, place, and well-being, can be usefully interpreted using perspectives from
health geography, including the notion of therapeutic landscapes (Gesler and Kearns,
2002; Kearns and Gesler, 1998). The therapeutic landscape concept is a conceptual
framework for analysing physical, social, and symbolic environments as they contribute
to physical and mental health and wellbeing in places (Gesler, 1992; 2003). Its early
development was based on three main lines of thought (the first stemming from
traditional cultural geography and environmental psychology and the second and third
from social theories that informed the `new' cultural geography (Cosgrove and Jackson,
1987): (1) from cultural ecology and environmental psychology came ideas about
nature as a healer and the importance of building design; (2) from structuralism
came ideas about social interactions and power relations in health settings, legitimisation
and marginalisation, and health consumerism; and (3) from humanism came ideas
about the importance of beliefs about disease and its treatment, the role of experiences
and feelings in places, and the symbolic power of myths and stories.
Over the past decade research informed by therapeutic landscape ideas has been
criticised for relying solely on developed country examples (Wilson, 2003), as well as
for neglecting negative aspects of healing environments. Researchers have noted that
what is perceived to be therapeutic must be seen in the context of social and economic
conditions and that everyday geographies of care must be studied as well as places with
592 S Curtis, W Gesler, K Fabian, S Francis, S Priebe
well-known reputations for healing (Gesler, 2005). The therapeutic landscape framework
has been employed in a wide variety of settings in both developed and less developed
areas (Gesler, 2003; Health and Place 2005). In a recent review of the hospital design
literature it is noted that ``the therapeutic value of hospitals is related to their physical,
social and symbolic design'' (Gesler et al, 2004, page 117). This paper extends the
usefulness of the therapeutic landscape concept by expanding on this statement.
The research reported here used a case-study approach to investigate perceptions of
hospital design among different groups of people using a newly built mental health
inpatient unit. We have interpreted their accounts in terms of a number of themes
which are also recognised in the research literature, and which we have summarised
here by way of introduction.
Respect and empowerment for people with mental illness
A recurrent theme that runs through the mental health literature is the stigma attached
to mental illness (Smith and Giggs 1988). Throughout history human societies have
labelled the mentally ill as different, deviant, or dangerous and treated them accordingly.
Philo (1989; 2000b) is among those offering a geographical interpretation of
Foucault's (1993) analysis of hospitals as spaces of medical power where patients are
subordinated to medical staff (and subjected to control by wider society, because
hospitalisation is not always voluntary in psychiatry).
Places in general are important for power relations because they contribute to both
expression and formation of the individual's sense of identity and their position in
society. This is certainly true of hospitals, given the transition of roles which the
individual undergoes in relinquishing the status and responsibilities of social life as
an ordinary member of a community and adopting the sick role of the patient with
its restrictions and subordination to medical regimes. People with mental illness often
find it difficult to exercise power in the treatment process and experience a lack of
respect, in hospitals as well as in wider society (Geores and Gesler, 1999; Parr, 1999). It
is important to consider how far the environment in a hospital respects the personality,
preferences, and cultural and religious mores of patients, especially when these may be
seen to be partially modi