Work and Support for Patients Outside Hospital

Abstract

This chapter examines whether the rehabilitative remit of patient workhad decreased in importance during the interwar years compared to during the nineteenth century. Despite the need to rebuild their respective economies after World War I, and the high unemployment of the Great Depression, patient occupation in French and English asylums did not appear to prepare patients for the modern workplace, as Freebody’s comparison of the work available locally to the work provided in linstitutions demonstrates. The work around the hospital tended to be based on outmoded artisanal techniques in France, while in England, occupational therapy, in the form of arts and crafts, was the antithesis of modern working practices, such as those associated with “scientific labour management”. Freebody attempts to explain this anomaly in terms of a focus on the "active treatment" of patients, rather than vocational rehabilitation, and increased levels of support for patients post-discharge in England, and to the emphasis on the financial contribution made by patient labour to asylum budgets in France.