Psychiatry in the Middle East: the rebirth of lunatic asylums?

This article briefly assesses the historical trajectory of psychiatric institutions in the Middle East. It underlines a key observation: the persistence and expansion of psychiatric institutionalisation, specifically in the Arab world. In contrast to the deinstitutionalisation that eventually closed large psychiatric hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s, notably in Europe and North America, psychiatric hospitals have continued to grow in size in the Arab world. This absence of deinstitutionalisation marks a major departure from how psychiatry developed in the West, which is worth reflecting on if we are to understand the current crumbling infrastructure of in-patient psychiatric facilities in the Arab region.