Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond review – missed opportunity to truly explore mental health

Wellcome Collection, London
This jumbled exhibition tracking changing attitudes to mental illness could have been a powerful study of Bedlam and psychiatry. Instead it fails to make sense of the real place and the myth

Sir Alexander Morison stands tall and sombre with his top hat in his left hand and a white handkerchief in his right. His eyes are grey and slightly sunken, his lips thin, his face long and gaunt. He seems marked by the sadness of his profession. For Morison was an “alienist”, a 19th-century doctor of mental illness, at London’s infamous asylum Bethlem Hospital, popularly known as Bedlam, whose history and cultural significance are explored by the Wellcome Collection’s new exhibition Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond.

Related: Taking over the asylum: art made at Bedlam and beyond – in pictures

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