Madness has long been interpreted as an internal dysfunction of the subject, yet certain twentieth-century clinical practices revealed its roots may lie equally in physical, social, and symbolic environments. Geo-psychiatry, developed within the framework of institutional psychotherapy in wartime and postwar France, posits that mental healthcare must not target the individual alone but rather the milieu—the formative, relational, and affective environment. This approach was embodied in clinics like Saint-Alban and Blida-Joinville, where practitioners such as Tosquelles, Fanon, and Guattari reimagined the psychiatric hospital as a social laboratory. Instead of dismantling institutions, they sought to transform them into porous, participatory spaces, entangled with external social currents, collective therapy, and artistic experimentation. The hospital, thus reconfigured, became a productive environment: a node where subjective, social, and media ecologies intersected. A notable example was Saint-Alban during the Nazi occupation, where patients, doctors, artists, and resistants cohabited in a dense network of survival through mutuality. In this context, the environment was not just the setting of pathology but the very medium of alienation and healing. These experiences mapped an alternative trajectory for psychiatry, one where madness emerged as a symptom of a disrupted ecology, and cure began by treating the atmosphere itself.
(Vogman, E. (2024) ‘Geo-psychiatry: Media and the Ecologies of Madness’, Grey Room, 97, pp. 76–117.
