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The Mansions in the Orchard project, funded by a Wellcome Trust People Award for Public Engagement, ran from September 2013 to March 2015. On behalf of the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, the authors carried out new historical research and documentation, alongside public engagement activities. The project addressed the largely undocumented twentieth-century history of inpatient mental health care in Britain through the
policy, A Vision for Change (Expert Group on Mental Health Policy, 2006: 48), also highlighted this group, noting that the mental health needs of specific groups such as refugees, asylum-seekers and ‘other immigrant populations will be addressed by the provision of comprehensive mental health services that are based on care planning taking all the needs of the individual into account’. How does this altered pattern of mental health need among migrants and non-native populations translate into access to mental health care and, specifically, rates of involuntary
interesting link between efforts to resolve the early NHS staffing crisis in mental hospitals (informed by parallel initiatives across other branches of nursing) and the emergence of a distinctive critique of the asylum as a past, present and future locus of mental health care that had no counterpoint in discussions about other hospital facilities. It is, however, evident that the institutional model of care remained dominant, with the 1960s and early 1970s paradoxically seeing both a commitment to alternative models of service delivery and major investments in new and
within the National Asylum Workers’ Union (NAWU).5 Both scandals concerned the care and management of male asylum patients, not the vulnerable madwoman identified by Showalter. In turn, the scandals affected the status of psychiatric nurses and perceptions of mental illness and asylum patients. Analysis of these scandals illustrates how occupational struggles between different professional groups within the field of mental health care were fuelled in part by conflicting representations of mental illness, and in turn could generate stigmatising discourses which
National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey (hereafter BNA), Lab 20/33, Ministry of Labour and National Service, ‘Liaison with Sutton Emergency Hospital: Special Psychiatric Centre’, note of a meeting held 19 August 1946. 19 Jones et al., ‘Work therapy’, p. 344. 20 See Vicky Long, ‘Rethinking post-war mental health care: Industrial therapy and the chronic mental patient in Britain’, Social History of Medicine, 26:4 (2013), 738–58, 756. 21 Maxwell Jones, ‘Industrial rehabilitation of mental patients still in hospital’, The Lancet, 268:6950 (1956), pp. 985–6. 22 BNA, FD 1
this finding to advocate the development of increased cultural competence among mental health care providers. Mental health is also the subject of Darius Whelan’s chapter, which analyses the oversight of the operations of mental health tribunals provided by the courts. Whelan argues that the courts have not engaged in robust supervision of tribunals and that the judicial approach has been to endorse tribunal decisions which deprive people of liberty and to limit interventions by the courts to the most serious violations of procedural rights. Whelan expresses
, the government ECT guidelines acknowledged ECT as an acceptable treatment, and from this time on ECT treatment gradually expanded again, although protests went on throughout the 1980s. In 1985, for example, the anti-psychiatric ‘Nuts Foundation’ in Nijmegen organised a public debate when ECT was reintroduced in Nijmegen University Hospital.44 The panel, which attracted over 200 attendees, also included a nurse, Ganny Boer. She was among a list of well-known public speakers on the topic, such as the provincial Inspector of Mental Health Care, and the Patient
continuous stakeholder engagement for research dissemination. Introduction Mental health care resources are finite. In order to ensure service users receive the highest quality health care, evidence about the most effective and acceptable treatments needs to be fully incorporated into health care policy and practice. However, we have known for a long time that this is not happening as well as it should be within health services and that research evidence is not being transferred sufficiently to routine clinical practice both in the UK and across the world. This is often
and stopping smoking.6 Managers have also been advised to give a much higher priority to mental health issues and to tackle stress, bullying, harassment and the deep-seated culture of long working hours. The Boorman review sets out a number of models of ideal mental health care including Tower Hamlets Primary Care Trust’s policy which trains managers to deal with staff’s mental health and Addenbrooke’s Hospital’s ‘Life’ scheme which offers staff poetry and painting competitions, book clubs, manicures and back massage.7 High rates of sickness absence in the nursing
health and destigmatise some forms of mental distress served to reinforce the stigma and reduce the resources available to more severe and chronic cases.10 When Thomson wrote in 1998, the history of learning disability was subsumed and overlooked within the literature on madness and he thus rightly sought to emphasise ‘the distinction between the mentally ill and the mentally disabled . . . in histories of mental health care’.11 As this historiographical neglect has now at least partially been addressed, it is perhaps time to query this distinction; to examine whether