In June 1961, in the French Lozère, two films were shown and discussed with an audience of psychiatric patients, nurses, doctors, farmers, and local villagers: The Mad Masters (1955) by Jean Rouch, then banned in France, and Chronicle of a Summer (1961) by Rouch and Edgar Morin, not yet officially released. This double screening, along with the contemporaneous production of three cinéma vérité films by Mario Ruspoli involving patients and doctors of the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital, forms part of the media history of institutional psychotherapy—a history that remains to be written.

Institutional psychotherapy was a psychiatric reform movement that emerged during World War II and the German occupation, which led to the mass extermination of patients during the famine that swept through hospitals. Saint-Alban became an asylum in the literal sense of the word—a refuge not only for patients but also for Jewish migrants, Resistance members, and surrealist artists. Initiated by the Catalan anarchist doctor in exile, Francesc Tosquelles, it was carried forward and transformed by figures such as Frantz Fanon, Ginette Michaud, Félix Guattari, and Fernand Deligny.

Departing from the assumption that “the hospital is ill,” the goal was to “heal the institution”—its surroundings and atmosphere—before any individual treatment. Exploring the film and media archives of institutional psychotherapy, I trace the relations between therapeutic and environmental aspects of its experimental practices. In contrast to the objectifying scientific or forensic uses of film in psychiatric contexts, these interventions proposed an environmental and participatory approach to mental health care, formative for direct cinema. Their method of géo-psychiatrie redefined “human geography” by fostering patients’ capacity to actively participate in each other’s cure. Finally, my presentation analyzes how geo-psychiatry and its participatory repurposing of technology contribute to current debates on media, cinema, and environmentality.