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Community Care and the Discharge of Patients from Mental Hospitals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2021

Philip Bean  and
Patricia Mounser
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Extract

In Britain the movement towards “Community Care” gathers apace. Segregation techniques in their traditional forms are steadily losing ground to newer community based alternatives. Both America and Britain have seen a massive reduction in the register of patients resident in mental hospitals; specifically in America from a peak of 560,000, and in Britain 165,000 in 1955, to some 273,000 and 70,000 respectively. And how has this been achieved? Through the rhetoric of “community care,” whose influence over policy in hospital admissions and discharges has been particularly remarkable, according to Peter Sedgwick, in that it does not in reality exist. America has been swift to adopt this new panacea “community care” where the emptying of asylums has turned out to have unforeseen problems. Creedmoor asylum for the borough of Queens in New York released 3,000 patients within a few months. Britain has been rather slow to follow—perhaps a little less ruthless—but the reduction of beds continues.

Type
Article
Information
Law, Medicine and Healthcare , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , Summer 1989 , pp. 166 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1989

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References

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