Community versus hospital care: The crisis in psychiatric provision

The movement away from hospital-based schemes of care for those with a psychiatric disability in favour of community-based schemes of care constitutes a turning point in the history of psychiatric provision in most Western European societies. The origins and rationale of this movement have sometimes been explained by reference to extra-discursive (economic) interests, and sometimes by reference to a form of technological or scientific determinism in which the discovery of such things as the neuroleptic drugs during the 1950s is said to have played a major role. This paper argues that the impetus for community as against hospital-based care can only be understood in terms of a changing discourse of psychiatry and psychiatric nursing, and especially those forms of thought which have tended to place 'illness' in the wings and set its primary sights on behavioural and social 'deficits'. There is a sense, therefore, in which hospital-based practices of psychiatrists and nurses have constituted the source and origin of their own transformation--a transformation in which the rationale of the psychiatric hospital has been eroded. The arguments in this paper are substantiated by reference to a current study of the forms of knowledge and daily practice which are drawn upon by nurses and psychiatrists in the psychiatric wards of a large Northern Irish hospital.