Introduction

Some years after leaving Long Grove, I worked in a registered care home for people diagnosed with severe mental illness who had been moved out of other large asylums. I worked closely with one particular patient I will call Marilyn. She was fifty-two and a long-standing patient who had been regularly hospitalised since her twenties. Like the other residents, Marilyn came to live in this particular home because the large institution where she formally lived was closing. Marilyn did not want to leave the institution and was sedated and driven in an ambulance to the registered care home. On arrival she was very distressed. She was verbally aggressive towards staff and other residents, and among numerous examples of disturbed behaviour, Marilyn would regularly lift her clothes to pee on the carpet next to a window in full view of people outside waiting at a bus stop.