ABSTRACT
Studies of psychiatric collecting have tended to focus on the material and visual traces of institutional environments of the past, rather than privileging the traces and presence of patients inside these institutions. This chapter provides a counterpart to existing material histories by presenting fi ndings from a study of the signifi cance of patients’ material and visual culture in an existing psychiatric institution. It draws upon data from an ethnography conducted during 2003 in a medium secure psychiatric unit in southern Britain where I interviewed and spent informal time with male and female patients and staff on two single-sex wards.1
