The Museum van de Geest ("Museum of the Mind") grew from the merger of the national psychiatry museum with Amsterdam's Outsider Art Museum, and the combination is genuinely unusual. The collection focuses on art made by people with psychiatric conditions — an enormous and often astonishing body of work that the mainstream art world has largely ignored.
The building, a former psychiatric hospital just north of Haarlem's train station, provides a fitting backdrop. The permanent collection spans centuries of artwork made within institutions and outside them, from intricate obsessive drawings to grand symbolic canvases. Temporary exhibitions explore the boundary between mental health, creativity, and identity. Worth an hour or two, and unlike any other museum in the region.