Barbara Taylor, 'The Last Asylum: a Memoir of Madness in our Times'

Barbara Taylor’s book The Last Asylum is her journey through mental illness and the psychiatric health care system. It begins with her visit to the innocuously named Princess Park Manor in Friern Barnet, North London - a picture of luxury and repose. But this is the former site of one of England's most infamous lunatic asylums, the Middlesex County Pauper Lunatic Asylum at Colney Hatch. At its peak this asylum housed nearly 3000 patients - among them, in the 1980s, Barbara Taylor herself. The Last Asylum is Taylor's powerful account of her battle with mental illness, set inside the wider story of the end of the UK asylum system.