Mental health care provisions belong to a history of treatment, care, support and service tightly connected to institutional and post-institutional spaces. This section brings together contributors from across the fields of organisation studies, geography, sociology, psychology, history, creative writing and architecture to draw attention to the significance of these spaces for processes of care, control and recovery of mental ill-health. Chapters range in focus from contemporary in-patient clinics (‘healing architecture’ and ‘carceral riskscapes’), islands and communities as institutionalised sites, spatial and organisational visions of the old asylums, contemporary experiential, creative encounters with archival material, and the discussion of abolition - as in should there really be a mental health system at all? Chapters taken together thus reveal the complexity and contradictions of mental health care spaces in the past, present and most likely also the future.