Psychiatric Hospitals and the Ethics of Salutogenic Design: The Return of Moral Architecture?

ABSTRACT: Bioethicists have long been concerned with the mistreatment of institutionalized patients, including those suffering from mental illness. Despite this attention, the built environments of health care settings have largely escaped bioethical analysis. This is a striking oversight given that architects and social scientists agree that buildings reflect and reinforce prevailing social, cultural, and medical attitudes. Architectural choices are therefore ethical choices. We argue that mental health institutions are fertile sites for ethical analysis. Examining the ethics of architecture calls attention to the potential for hospitals to hinder autonomy. Additionally, such examination highlights the salutogenic possibilities of institutional design, that is to care, nurture, and enhance patient and provider well-being.

Nature Rx: Reemergence of Pediatric Nature-Based Therapeutic Programs From the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries.

Across the United States, physicians are prescribing patients nature. These "Nature Rx" programs promote outdoor activity as a measure to combat health epidemics stemming from sedentary lifestyles. Despite the apparent novelty of nature prescription programs, they are not new. Rather, they are a reemergence of nature-based therapeutics that characterized children's health programs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These historic programs were popular among working-class urban families, physicians, and public health officials. By contrast, adherence is a challenge for contemporary programs, especially in socially disadvantaged areas. Although there are differences in nature prescription programs and social context, historical antecedents provide important lessons about the need to provide accessible resources and build on existing social networks. They also show that nature-and its related health benefits-does not easily yield itself to precise scientific measurements or outcomes. Recognizing these constraints may be critical to nature prescription programs' continued success and support from the medical profession.

Better babies: social engineering for 'a better nation, a better world'.

Across the United States in the 1910s thousands of parents entered their children in the widely popular Better Babies contests. During the competitions, physicians and other health professionals examined and scored children for their bodily measurements, and physical and mental development. The baby with the highest score won. These contests not only served as a means of identifying children with previously unknown health conditions, but also taught mothers that through scientific care they could make their children into standardized babies, and therefore productive citizens of the future.