In 1953 the World Health Organization produced a report dealing with ‘essential mental hospital provisions'. The report emphasised the importance of the atmosphere of the hospital:‘The most important single factor in the efficacy of the treatment given in a mental hospital appears to the Committee to be an intangible element which can only be described as its atmosphere, and in attempting to describe some of the influences which go to the creation of this atmosphere, it must be said at the outset that the more the psychiatric hospital imitates the general hospital as it at present exists, the less successful it will be in creating the atmosphere it needs. Too many psychiatric hospitals give the impression of being an uneasy compromise between a general hospital and a prison. Whereas, in fact, the role they have to play is different from either; it is that of a therapeutic community’ (World Health Organization, 1953)
Changing Tendency of the Psychiatric Hospitals' Acute Wards for Return to Society in Japan
