Rethinking Post-war Mental Health Care: Industrial Therapy and the Chronic Mental Patient in Britain

Abstract

The article argues that we need to examine how the transformations of psychiatric practice in the post-war era affected individuals suffering from chronic mental disorder, via an analysis which encompasses the biomedical and social dimensions of intra- and extra-mural care. It focuses upon the development of industrial therapy units in British psychiatric hospitals, in which patients undertook industrial sub-contract work. Industrial therapy disregarded research undertaken by industrial psychologists in the interwar years which asserted that repetitive, monotonous factory work had a detrimental impact on mental health. Instead, psychiatrists drew inspiration from systems of rehabilitation inaugurated by the Ministry of Labour to help people with disabilities re-enter the workforce. This article explores how economic constraints shaped the design and delivery of industrial therapy, and suggests that industrial therapy helped entrench the stigma attached to chronic mental illness by assessing long-stay patients according to their productivity.

chronic mental illness, psychiatric rehabilitation, industrial therapy, psychiatric hospitals, disability