Industrial Units in Psychiatric Hospitals

Abstract

The recent development of industrial therapy (Early 1960 and 1963; Wadsworth 1958, 1961, 1962 and Smith 1963) in British mental hospitals reflects our current therapeutic optimism and takes advantage of a period of full employment in industry. Industrial therapy has been found to be an important weapon in the prevention or cure of institutional neurosis (Barton 1959). It is, of course, well known that during the past two decades institutional neurosis has been markedly reduced by a more permissive and non-authoritarian approach to patients, including amongst other things greater freedom, more enlightened nursing and the use of group techniques and occupational therapy in various forms. However, if patients are to be rehabilitated and the best use made of their personality resources, their lives within the hospital should be as close as possible to normal life in the community, and it follows that like normal citizens they should be employed at productive, useful and satisfying work for which they should receive proper economic rewards. This work may be in a factory setting, but need not exclude in some circumstances work in certain hospital departments. However, in order to prevent confusion the term industrial therapy should only be used when “patients are employed in factory-type work under medical and nursing supervision which aims at their rehabilitation and/or resettlement, the nature of the work being related to the needs of the individual patient, giving him both psychological and economic satisfaction”. It appears that in the United States the traditional employment of patients in hospital departments without pay (except token payments in kind) is now being called industrial therapy; it is likely, however that American interest in the totally different British concept of industrial therapy will lead there to a change in approach. It should, therefore, be stressed that an integral part of industrial therapy is financial reward for work done according to ability, motivation and production. Thus “economic satisfaction” is an essential part of any definition.