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If we don’t make new antibiotics, we will lose the ability to practice
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Patrick Cockburn: The demise of the asylum and
the rise of care in the community
The treatment of the mentally ill measures the health of any society
Henry Cockburn was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2002. Before
that he was a heavy cannabis user.
His father, Patrick Cockburn, The Independent’s award-winning
foreign correspondent, has seen – at first hand – the dramatic changes in
the way we treat the mentally ill over recent decades. Today, in the second
of his groundbreaking four-part series, he explains how psychiatric care in
Britain went wrong – while Henry reveals his experiences as a
schizophrenic marooned in the system.
The treatment of the mentally ill measures the health of any society
because they are the most vulnerable and the least able to defend
themselves against cruelty and neglect. It is an issue that affects the lives
of a large part of the population. At any one time some seven million
people in England and Wales over the age of 16 – one in six of the adult
population – are suffering from a significant psychiatric problem. At least
one-third of all families have a member who will at some stage be
mentally ill.
Mental illness may be pervasive but it remains a largely hidden
plague. Despite significant progress over the past decade, knowledge of
psychiatric disorders lags far behind that of physical illnesses. Neatsounding
categories such as schizophrenia, bi-polar depression and
schizoid-affective are not distinct diseases like TB or polio, but names
given to a psychosis on the basis of symptoms evident when a patient sees
a psychiatrist. As these symptoms change – as they often do – so does the
diagnosis.
In the 1950s medications were discovered that could control, but not
cure, mental disorders, and it is still not known exactly how they work.
Only last month it was revealed that big pharmaceutical companies have