Overview of "Mental" from BBC Four
Jan. 14th, 2011 10:06 pmAnna (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
trouble) requested that someone in the UK review this history of British mental health care since the 1950s, which originally went out in May 2010 and was repeated last Friday. It focusses mainly on one asylum, High Royds near Leeds, which opened in 1888 and finally closed in 2003. There are interviews with several former patients, nurses and psychiatrists, not all of whom were committed to or worked at High Royds.
There were three female and one male patient featured. One of the women was a long-stay patient, who was admitted to an asylum near Aylesbury (near London) some time after the War on account of her panic attacks, and remained in the system for more than 33 years. It seems that she was finally discharged during the 1980s, when a lot of long-stay patients were being discharged (but before the big "care in the community" drive of the 1990s). She described the asylum as a place where there was no privacy, with huge numbers of beds in a room placed end to end, and not much to do; she started helping a nurse make the beds because of boredom, turned to drink for much the same reason and ended up in a padded cell after entering the wrong ward and collapsing while drunk. She was given as an example of someone admitted for reasons which could have been treated in the community rather than necessitating a lengthy stay in the hospital; others seem to have been admitted for no sound reason. The regime was dominated by security, with every door locked every time a patient passed through, and high railings surrounding the grounds.
( Read more; some descriptions of abuse )
trouble) requested that someone in the UK review this history of British mental health care since the 1950s, which originally went out in May 2010 and was repeated last Friday. It focusses mainly on one asylum, High Royds near Leeds, which opened in 1888 and finally closed in 2003. There are interviews with several former patients, nurses and psychiatrists, not all of whom were committed to or worked at High Royds.There were three female and one male patient featured. One of the women was a long-stay patient, who was admitted to an asylum near Aylesbury (near London) some time after the War on account of her panic attacks, and remained in the system for more than 33 years. It seems that she was finally discharged during the 1980s, when a lot of long-stay patients were being discharged (but before the big "care in the community" drive of the 1990s). She described the asylum as a place where there was no privacy, with huge numbers of beds in a room placed end to end, and not much to do; she started helping a nurse make the beds because of boredom, turned to drink for much the same reason and ended up in a padded cell after entering the wrong ward and collapsing while drunk. She was given as an example of someone admitted for reasons which could have been treated in the community rather than necessitating a lengthy stay in the hospital; others seem to have been admitted for no sound reason. The regime was dominated by security, with every door locked every time a patient passed through, and high railings surrounding the grounds.
( Read more; some descriptions of abuse )
