And did this nicer form of early asylum, did it produce any sort of tangible

results? Well, it's, of course, extremely difficult after the fact for us to go back.

But I think the answer is yes in the case of many of these early institutions, which were quite small.

We're talking 30, 40, 50 patients.

a charismatic figure running the institution, attendants who are highly motivated to turn the other cheek, if you like, to treat patients as suffering, not as people who need to be beaten when they don't conform.

And I think, yes, there's probably something to that.

The difficulty is once you start to try to generalize that, and particularly once institutions start to grow in size to 100, 200, 300, 500, 1,000, eventually 10,000, you can't sustain that kind of individual attention to patients, nor can you reproduce the early enthusiasm that I think produces a very positive placebo effect, if you like.

lives as a private citizen somewhere and she doesn't want to be disturbed.

... into the rich history that you so eloquently write about.

So psychiatry is a profession that tries to deal with an enormously complicated thing, the human mind, the human emotions, the human ability to attempt to understand the world.

And in particular, obviously, it focuses on people where our common sense approach to the world seems to break down.

Uh, people whose emotional life is filled with turmoil, people whose ability to relate to others is badly damaged.

People who see things in the world that the rest of us simply think aren't there.

They're illusions.

They're hallucinations.

when, uh, talk therapy starts coming to life, maybe in the religious context with the Christian Science and then psychoanalysis context.