Mental Health Community Care in Great Britain: Idealism and Reality

This article looks at the evolution of mental health care in the community in Great Britain from the 1950s to the present day. One of the main aims of the 1959 Mental Health Act was to close the asylums and deinstitutionalise psychiatric patients. There was, however, no agreement on the way in which community care should be set up for the former asylum inmates. It rapidly became apparent that patients and their families saw community care as a more humane way of caring for the mentally unwell, whereas politicians saw it primarily as a means of cutting the cost of mental health care. The failure to ever develop an overall vision of what community care should be, together with the significant cuts in government funding for mental health which have taken place over the past twelve years, have resulted in a mental health care system in crisis.