Merry, Merry!
Just a note to recommend a very wonderful book I've recently come across. It's from MIT Press and it's called "Asylum": photographs by Christopher Payne, forward by Oliver Sacks. It's about the extraordinary edifices built in the U.S. to house the mentally ill. Places where one could be safely insane and which were completely run/maintained by the inmates. With pools, gardens, livestock, craft studios, theaters, tv studios, etc. All came to an end with the introduction of psychotropic drugs in the fifties and the eventual deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill.
The photographs in the book are magnificent, and Sacks' introduction makes me want to know a lot more about why and how these institutions were destroyed.
Check it out,
Joanna