Madlove: A Designer Asylum

It ain't no bad thing to need a safe place to go mad. The problem is that a lot of psychiatric hospitals are more punishment than love…they need some Madlove.

Is it possible to go mad in a positive way? How would you create a safe place in which to do so? If you designed your own asylum, what would it look like?

Artists Hannah Hull and the vacuum cleaner have run Madlove: A Designer Asylum workshops for 432 people with lived experience of mental distress in a range of settings: from high security psychiatric hospitals to activist groups. 

They have accumulated thousands of suggestions for how a utopian mental health hospital could look and work. Here they are presented for the first time through Rosemary Cunningham's illustrations, that sit alongside designers Benjamin Koslowski and James Christian's model of a designer asylum.