Deinstitutionalisation and After by Despo Kritsotaki Vicky Long & Matthew Smith

Author:Despo Kritsotaki, Vicky Long & Matthew Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

1948–1957: Salford Mental Health Department: The First Decade

A gradual process of enlightenment of public opinion towards those suffering from mental illness is becoming evident. Co-operation and understanding are very slowly but surely taking the place of mistrust and derision … It is not too much to hope that the Mental Health Service through its important features for prevention, care and after-care of the mentally sick, can claim some share of the credit for this.19

Post-war Salford was a small (eight square miles) city in the north-west of England, whose industrial heritage was all too evident in the ‘smoke polluted air, more houses to the acre than almost anywhere in England’,20 and in the impoverished health and economic circumstances of many of its 175,000 residents. In the early years there was arguably little to distinguish Salford’s mental health department from those around it. It faced many of the problems discussed above and throughout the first decade struggled to recruit appropriately qualified staff. George Mountney recalls how, when he arrived as a trainee in 1955, ‘the people who were doing the job were people who’d been either clerical officers, maybe in the department, and a job came available and they took it on. And the bloke in charge was an ex-nurse, mental nurse.’21 The ‘bloke in charge’, Mr Hope, fitted the stereotypical image perfectly:I think Hope really … admired and aspired to be tough. He knew the job was tough and he admired courage … You know, he saw it as a tough job and he was strong enough and brave enough to deal with it.22

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