Chapter 1 - Mental health legislation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
Summary
Opportunities to make substantive changes in mental health legislation occur infrequently. In England and Wales the 1890 Lunacy Act confirmed and established legalism; that is, admissions to mental hospitals and treatment in those hospitals were to be governed at all times by statute and controlled and supervised by government bodies such as the Board of Control. The emphasis was on the legal rights of the patient (see Bean, 1980). When legalism was found to be unworkable, mainly because of the stigma said to be associated with mental hospital admissions and the manner in which legalism prevented patients entering mental hospitals except by the courts, the 1930 Mental Treatment Act was introduced. That Act allowed some patients to enter hospital voluntarily, that is without certification. Thirty years later legalism was swept away, to be replaced by a medical view of mental disorder, the terms and definition of which were provided by the Royal Commission preceding the 1959 Mental Health Act (HMSO, 1957). That commission saw mental disorder generally and mental illness in particular as being the province of the medical profession. It was, said the commission, the task of the medical profession to diagnose and treat such conditions and inappropriate for the lawyer and the courts to impose and dictate their terms of reference. The commission's view has now been refined. In the manner in which the 1930 Mental Treatment Act softened legalism, so the 1983 Mental Health Act has softened the medical view.
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- Mental Disorder and Legal Control , pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986