In 1925, Albert Londres brought together a series of articles describing daily life in psychiatric asylums. A hundred years later, the landscape is very different.

Considerable progress has been made, enabling psychiatry to become a truly therapeutic discipline. Unfortunately, after a period of growth from the 1950s to the end of the 20th century, underfunded public psychiatry is retreating into a security-driven logic and a bleakly biomedical view of mental disorders. Meanwhile, private institutions are flourishing, although financial imperatives compete with healthcare in troubling ways. The resulting system leaves many patients untreated. And yet, this scandal is by no means inevitable.