Asylums

This book is an analysis of life in 'total institutions' – closed worlds such as prisons, army training camps, naval vessels, boarding schools, monasteries, nursing homes, and mental hospitals.

Goffman describes what these institutions make of the inmate and what the inmate can make of life inside them.

Special attention is given to mental hospitals, drawing on the author's year of field work at St. Elizabeth's in Washington, D.C.

The book argues that the most important factor in forming a mental-hospital patient is the institution itself, rather than the illness, and that the patient's reactions and adjustments are similar to those of inmates in other types of institutions.