The History of Mental Health Services in Modern England: Practitioner Memories and the Direction of Future Research

Author:

Turner John,Hayward Rhodri,Angel Katherine,Fulford Bill,Hall John,Millard Chris,Thomson Mathew

Abstract

Writing the recent history of mental health services requires a conscious departure from the historiographical tropes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which have emphasised the experience of those identified (and legally defined) as lunatics and the social, cultural, political, medical and institutional context of their treatment. A historical narrative structured around rights (to health and liberty) is now complicated by the rise of new organising categories such as ‘costs’, ‘risks’, ‘needs’ and ‘values’. This paper, drawing on insights from a series of witness seminars attended by historians, clinicians and policymakers, proposes a programme of research to place modern mental health services in England and Wales in a richer historical context. Historians should recognise the fragmentation of the concepts of mental illness and mental health need, acknowledge the relationship between critiques of psychiatry and developments in other intellectual spheres, place the experience of the service user in the context of wider socio-economic and political change, understand the impacts of the social perception of ‘risk’ and of moral panic on mental health policy, relate the politics of mental health policy and resources to the general determinants of institutional change in British central and local government, and explore the sociological and institutional complexity of the evolving mental health professions and their relationships with each other and with their clients. While this is no small challenge, it is perhaps the only way to avoid the perpetuation of ‘single-issue mythologies’ in describing and accounting for change.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

History,Medicine (miscellaneous),General Nursing

Reference130 articles.

1. For a partial exception, see Cathy Smith, ‘Family, Community and the Victorian Asylum: A Case Study of Northampton General Lunatic Asylum and its Pauper Lunatics’, Family and Community History, 9, 2 (2006), 109–24.

2. Notably child psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic: Rustin, op. cit. (note 105), 10–11. This is still true for counselling psychology.

3. See for example the second (1981) edition of Shepherd et al., Psychiatric Illness in General Practice and D. Tantam and D. Goldberg, ‘Primary medical care’ in Douglas H. Bennett and Hugh L. Freeman, Community Psychiatry: The Principles (London: Churchill Livingstone, 1991), 361–85.

4. The phrase was used by Kathleen Jones as a chapter heading in Asylums and After, and has provoked legal and medical historians ever since.

5. Psychiatry beyond the current paradigm

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