Community Mental Health Care: International Perspectives on Making it Happen

Ed Christine Dean, Hugh Freeman Gaskell (Royal College of Psychiatrists), £10, pp 140 ISBN 0-902241-58-3

The 1975 white paper Better Services for the Mentally Ill established a target of 47 900 inpatient beds at the end of its planned programme of hospital closures. Between 1981 and 1991, 35 000 psychiatric beds were closed in England and Wales, with 50 000 remaining.

This trend, which was duplicated in many Western countries, was due largely to advances in psychopharmacology; but government parsimony in allocating resources to the most severely mentally ill patients, more liberal mental health …