'She thinks this is the Queen's Castle': women patients' perceptions of an Ontario psychiatric hospital

Drawing on the detailed information contained in patient case files, this study explores women patients' perceptions of the Ontario Hospital, Cobourg, a psychiatric facility for women which operated from 1920 to 1974. The paper concludes that, while twentieth-century psychiatry promoted an image of asylums as modern medical facilities, women patients continued to view these institutions as 'crazy houses', 'havens' and 'prisons'. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s, the eve of the decline of the authority of scientific psychiatry, that some women patients began to conceive of psychiatric hospitals as 'medical' facilities where therapeutic care could be sought.