The Mental Hospital: A Pattern for the Future

Abstract

The great changes that have occurred in mental hospitals over the last fifteen years due to improvements in treatment of both acute and chronic psychiatric illnesses are reflected in the dramatic running down of the long-stay patient population. The Ministry of Health (1961) and Tooth and Brooke (1961) envisaged a continuing fall in the number of beds for psychiatric patients, so that by the mid 1970s these would have been reduced by nearly 50 per cent. from their 1960 figure (3·4 to 1·8 per thousand population). This prediction has been criticized because it was considered too optimistic, while the implication that the mental hospital, as we know it today, might cease to exist has provoked controversy.