The World’s Most Beautiful Mental Health Clinic

The first thing you notice about the Adamant is that it’s absolutely beautiful — not just for a psychiatric facility, which tend to resemble prisons or kennels, but for a building of any kind. A floating barge moored on the right bank of the Seine (where it’s surrounded by a labyrinth of unfeeling concrete towers), this self-contained wing of the Paris Central Psychiatric Group sticks out of the landscape like an antique cabinet that was accidentally dropped into the middle of an Ikea showroom; it’s hard to shake the feeling that someone might notice the error and scoop the whole thing right out of the water at any moment. 

And yet the barge’s oak brown wooden slats continue to creak open every morning, music to the ears of local men and women whose mental disorders have left them nowhere else to go. Unlike so many other day centers like it, however, the Adamant refuses to act like a last resort. Staffed by plainclothes health specialists and home to art workshops, a screening room, and a café that’s run by some of its most loyal customers, the Adamant is both a safe haven and a thriving community unto itself. Their attendance may be prescribed, but its patients want to be there, and that makes all the difference to their dignity. 

Mental illness so often becomes a double blind that can make people appear invisible to the world (and themselves along with it), but the Adamant — absent the visual signifiers of psychiatric treatment…