View report page

The Changing Vista of Community Mental Health: by Dr. U.P. Seidel
The year 1970 saw the implementation of the Local Authority Social Service Act which based on the Seebohm
Committee Recommendations, divorced mental health social work from health, and therefore, from the medical
side of community psychiatric care.
This in my view was a mistake and I hope the Hospital Boards will not have to pay dearly for it both in man power
and in In and Out Patient facilities.
My reasons for saying this are quite simple. Over the past few years we have tried and to a certain extent
succeeded in building up a community psychiatric service whereby mentally disordered persons could remain in
the community more often and longer and, if required to enter hospital, earlier discharges were made possible.
This was in accord with the true spirit of the Mental Health Act of 1959 which envisaged an expanding
community based psychiatric service.
That such a service cannot function without the close participation of medical people trained and experienced
in psychological medicine and stationed in the community must have been obvious to anyone who knows
anything at all about mental disorders.
The Mental Welfare Officers let alone the new generic social workers will be unable either by qualification,
training or experience to carry out this task adequately and efficiently on their own without obvious dangers
to the patient.
In this highly specialised field of psychiatric community care, ties between social workers and community
psychiatrists should have become closer and not severed altogether as appears to be the case under the new
Act.
Furthermore, instead of having a generic social worker deal with psychiatric cases, I would have suggested
the very opposite, namely to raise the qualifications, training and experience of all social workers working in
mental health to that of the psychiatric social worker we are accustomed to deal with in the hospital setting.
Are we turning back the clock to the time of the Duly Authorised Officer whose main function consisted
of compulsory disposal of psychiatric patients to mental institutions ?
56