Recovery From Schizophrenia: Psychiatry And Political Economy

94 DEINSTITUTIONALIZATIONLABOR DYNAMICSSo great was the labor shortage in postwar Britain that The Times of January 1947called for the selective immigration of half a million foreign workers, and economistLionel Robbins warned that 100,000 foreigners should be recruited to work inthe coal mines if the country was not “to lapse into a position of impotence andeconomic chaos.” The government launched an attack on non-productive “spivsand drones,” and the Daily Mail argued that if Scotland Yard were used “to helpto round up the work dodgers” one-and-a-half million workers could be added tothe labor force. By September of that year the Cabinet was discussing thepossibility of banning the football pools to force the redeployment of the womenwho processed the coupons into the labor-starved textile industry. 63A sustained, peacetime labor shortage of these dimensions had not been seen inBritain, or in those other northern European nations that experienced thephenomenon, since employment records began or, quite probably, since thebeginning of the Industrial Revolution. It seems reasonable to suppose that such ademand for labor, extraordinary also by recent Western standards, was a majorstimulus to the effective rehabilitation of the mentally ill. Contemporary observersconfirm this view. British social psychiatrist David Clark identified as majorfactors that promoted the European Open Door Movement anddeinstitutionalization: “the development of welfare states where the disabled(including the psychiatrically crippled) were supported in their homes, [and] thedevelopment of full employment (in northern Europe at least) creating a demandfor the labour of impaired people.” 64 Similarly, Professor Ödegard reported ofNorway: “Since the war there has mostly been a certain degree of overemployment,and it has been possible for hospitals to discharge to an independentexistence even patients with a borderline working capacity and a questionablesocial adjustment.” 65 In Massachusetts, one of the few parts of the United Stateswhere the mental hospital population began to diminish before antipsychoticdrugs were introduced, the decline in hospital use was also seen to be associatedwith a vigorous demand for labor. 66The strategic importance of the rehabilitation of large numbers of the mentallyill should not be underestimated. Between the Great Depression and the 1950sthe proportion of people with schizophrenia in Britain who were employed mayhave increased by as much as 20 percentage points; this estimate is suggested bythe improvement in the social recovery rate of people with schizophrenia inBritain as revealed in the previous chapter. Since 34 people in every 10,000 of thepopulation suffered from schizophrenia, according to a postwar prevalence studyconducted in London, 67 one can estimate that the rehabilitation of these peoplealone may have added 30,000 workers to the British labor force.A number of other reports confirmed that rehabilitation efforts for the disabledare closely related to the demand for labor. The Heller Committee survey ofpermanently disabled workers in the San Francisco Bay area in 1942 and 1943found that wartime labor conditions left virtually none of the disabled