Institutional forgetting/forgetting institutions: Space and memory in secure forensic psychiatric care

Secure forensic psychiatric care can be approached as an ‘institutional assemblage’. In place of the old ‘grand asylums’, modern units are emergent spaces of care and security that consist of heterogeneous and contradictory sets of elements. Secure units enact a folding of time and space, despite their porous boundaries and extensions into the community. Patients live a ‘suspended life’ where their past experiences are deemed irrelevant to the stabilization of their current condition. These institutions instill a ‘regime of forgetting’ based around recoding experience into the categories of thought of psychiatric discourse. The outcome is a changed self-relation in the form of a corporeal transformation where the ability to create coherence between past and future experience is disrupted.