Psychiatric Patients and the Inner City
Dear, “Psychiatric Patients and the Inner City”, Annals, Association of American Geographers, 67(4), 1977, 588‑594
Inner portions of North American cities may be becoming the location of an asylum without walls for psychiatric patients discharged from mental hospitals. This trend represents an organic outgrowth from the moves to diminish the role of the mental hospital and to encourage a community‐based mental health. Discharged patients are comparatively mobile and a large proportion of them filter through urban space to an inner city location. This is a result both of formal placement procedures and of an informal process of spatial filtering within the inner core.
