Integration in a Divided World: Salford Community Mental Health Services 1948–1974

Abstract

Harrington offers a rare insight into how the vision of community mental healthcare contained within the 1959 Mental Health Act translated into ground-level service provision. Drawing on archival sources and oral history interviews, her case study of a local authority mental health department in the north-west of England focuses on the processes of, and obstacles to, change within community mental health services during the first 25 years of the NHS. Harrington sets this in the context of the wider historiographical debates about the relationship between the national and the local within the change process, and the value of small-scale case studies within the broader history of deinstitutionalisation.