Referring to his unconventional plays Attempts on Her Life (1997) and Fewer Emergencies (2005), Martin Crimp once said that ‘in this second kind of writing, the dramatic space is a mental space, not a physical one.’ Picking up on this expression, I propose to define the main characteristics of a theatre 'in-yer-head' rather than 'in-yer-face', which explores individual mindcsapes, psychological complexes and traumas, and psychiatric disorders, from alternating and often marginalised points of view and a poetic use of voices. In Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life, the suicide character of Anne who, in scenario 11, ‘quite clearly should’ve been admitted […] to a psychiatric unit […] where she could receive treatment,’ is used as a means to explore the secret obsessions that filter through the words of anonymous characters who comment upon her life and death. Sarah Kane's last two plays, Crave (1998) and 4.48 Psychosis (2000), show a similar evolution of her work towards what could be termed a ‘psychopoetics' of the stage. Her last piece can be interpreted as a first-person sequel to Attempts on Her Life, restoring Anne's presence on stage through the voice of an anonymous female patient receiving treatment in a mental hospital before committing suicide. More broadly, the construction of a dramatic space that is no longer physical but psychological and which investigates mental disorders (most often suffered by women) seems to characterize a specific turn in contemporary theatre towards a stylised staging of our ‘dramas-in-the-head’ (Crimp). In addition to Crimp’s and Kane’s plays, I propose to see how other British plays, such as for instance Anthony Neilson's The Wonderful World of Dissocia (2004) and Mark Haddon's Polar Bears (2010), also evoke the tortuous and haunted mindscapes of psychotic female characters and their rich inner worlds. Often tentatively contained in the confined space of a hospital room, these mental spaces parallel, oppose and interact with the outer reality in various ways. Using Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner's mental space theory, I study how these plays renew the forms of a stylised psychiatric realism on stage while raising urgent ethical and societal questions around the notion that ‘part of modern identity is to live inside our heads’ (Crimp). I also ask why the female psyche remains an epitome of alterity - at least from a male point of view - and is still regarded as a fertile terrain of poetic and dramatic investigation.