Throughout the documents I have researched for this website, the patient’s family features prominently – not only in the admission and discharge procedures, but particularly while patients were hospitalised. Families wanted to be actively involved in a patient’s treatment rather than passively watching from the outside. While psychiatry nowadays recognises the role of the family in mental illness, such ‘interference’ was not always welcome by the Medical Superintendent in earlier decades. If your family member was mentally ill, would you want to be involved in their treatment? To what degree?