Critical scholarship on ‘asylum and post-asylum geographies’ has been ongoing since at least the early-1980s, but rarely has it attended directly to the problematic of whether the mental health system itself should exist or, conversely, be abolished. There are few studies which have asked the ultimately searching question of whether the very object that it studies - in all its different configurations and organisations - should ideally disappear. Our chapter explores this question, recognising that answers to it necessarily acquire complexity and nuance due to the vulnerable and indeed often suffering character of people accessing mental healthcare provisions. Our conclusion is that mental health geography has tended to work - but also probably should work ‘in the cracks’ between abolition and reform, precisely because of what psychiatric ‘user-survivors’ often value about places to which they feel belonging even when those places have compromised origins, histories and functions.