Care in the Community has been a failure for the mentally sick!
Care in the community is ‘a £100bn failure’: Mentally ill patients have been neglected for decades, says Iain Duncan Smith think-tank
By Jason Groves
The controversial ‘care in the community’ approach to treating the mentally ill has been a £100billion failure, a report warns today.
The study by the respected Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) suggests that many mental health patients have been ‘neglected’ for decades because the policy of closing down asylums was not accompanied by an increase in local care.
The think-tank says the £6billion-a-year cost of dealing with mental health is the single biggest burden on the NHS.
But it warns that the cost to society has been even higher, with social costs, the impact of lost working days and family breakdown taking the total bill to a ‘completely unsustainable’ £105billion.
The report says the mentally ill still occupy a ‘disproportionately large’ number of hospital beds because of knock-on health problems.
The CSJ, which retains close links to its founder, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, says the closure of the asylums ‘required a far-reaching cultural change that has stalled and meant many needs currently go unmet’.
It calls for a far great emphasis on preventing family breakdown, and it suggests the authorities should make ‘early intervention in the lives of troubled families’ to nip problems in the bud.
The call for more emphasis on keeping families together is likely to prove controversial with some in the mental health field, not least because of evidence that family problems can cause disturbed behaviour.
The move towards community care began in the 1950s and 1960s amid controversy over conditions in Victorian asylums. The number of beds in psychiatric hospitals halved in the 20 years to 1975.
But the big push came in the 1980s with the introduction of new laws giving mentally ill people more rights.
The policy has been blamed for allowing dangerous mental patients to roam the streets, and there have been high-profile killings involving care in the community patients.
But the study claims that the link between mental illness and violence is ‘vastly exaggerated’ and suggests that doctors are too quick to detain people unnecessarily or to put them on powerful ‘mind-numbing’ drugs.
It says that treatment is ineffective in two-thirds of cases and calls for small grassroots charities to be given a greater role in helping people with mental health problems reintegrate with society.
