UK Deinstitutionalisation: Neoliberal Values and Mental Health

Abstract

The year 2021 marks the sixtieth anniversary of Enoch Powell's Water Tower speech-a famous or infamous occasion depending upon one's assessment of deinstitutionalisation and the advent of community care. The number of patients resident in many hospitals had begun to decline several years before antipsychotics arrived on the scene. The population of asylums did shrink significantly throughout the 1960s and 1970s, though mental hospitals did not begin to vanish from the scene until the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher. Deinstitutionalisation was no accident. It was a consciously chosen neoliberal policy, pursued relentlessly over many decades. Welfare 'reform', in Britain as in the United States, has become a term of art disguising repeated assaults on the social safety net and the demonisation of those dependent upon it. 'Community care' in the era of neoliberal politics has turned out to be an Orwellian euphemism, masking a nightmare existence for all too many of those afflicted with serious psychoses and for their families. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)