There are those who come to Switzerland to admire the Jungfrau, cross the Lucerne bridge, wander the cobbled streets of Locarno. And then there are others looking for surprises, quirks, astonishment. For those, a Atlas Obscura online lists unusual places in the country. “Le Temps” has selected a few curiosities and takes you there by pen …
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You enter through a heavy wooden door interspersed with black metal bars. Almost three hundred years ago, it blocked the way for so-called “mad” patients, held in solitary confinement. Located in Ostermundigen, on the outskirts of Bern, the Psychiatry Museum traces the development of care for people with mental disorders from the Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth century, from straitjackets to medication, via electroshock therapy. An unusual journey, often chilling, which brings to rethink the definition of “madness” and in which we discover countless art objects made by self-taught patients.
The museum building, founded in 1993, previously housed the Pfrundhaus, one of the establishments in the Waldau complex, an asylum designed to house patients with strange moods, who today would be diagnosed as depressed, bipolar or schizophrenic. Later, the place will be renamed psychiatric hospital and asylum for the insane, to become, from the end of the 20th century, the university clinic of today which shelters 280 beds.
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