Psychiatric hospital

Psychiatric hospitals, also known as mental hospitals, mental health units, mental asylums or simply asylums, are hospitals or wards specializing in the treatment of serious mental disorders, such as major depressive disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Psychiatric hospitals vary widely in their size and grading. Some hospitals may specialize only in short term or outpatient therapy for low-risk patients. Others may specialize in the temporary or permanent care of residents who, as a result of a psychological disorder, require routine assistance, treatment, or a specialized and controlled environment. Patients are often admitted on a voluntary basis, but people whom psychiatrists believe may pose a significant danger to themselves or others may be subject to involuntary commitment. Psychiatric hospitals may also be referred to as psychiatric wards or units (or 'psych' wards/units) when they are a subunit of a regular hospital.Modern psychiatric hospitals evolved from, and eventually replaced the older lunatic asylums. The development of the modern psychiatric hospital is also the story of the rise of organized, institutional psychiatry.There are a number of different types of modern psychiatric hospitals, but all of them house people with mental illnesses of widely variable severity.Hungarian-born psychiatrist Thomas Szasz insisted that psychiatric hospitals are like prisons, not proper hospitals, and that psychiatrists who coerce people (into treatment or involuntary commitment) function as judges and jailers, not physicians. The French historian Michel Foucault is widely known for his comprehensive critique of the use and abuse of the mental hospital system in Madness and Civilization. He argued that Tuke and Pinel's asylum was a symbolic recreation of the condition of a child under a bourgeois family. It was a microcosm symbolizing the massive structures of bourgeois society and its values: relations of Family–Children (paternal authority), Fault–Punishment (immediate justice), Madness–Disorder (social and moral order).To see lists of individual establishments: view the categorical index for Psychiatric hospitals; which appears at the very bottom of this article.