ABSTRACT
As I indicated in the previous chapter the move towards community care has been associated with a significant reorientation of services away from the chronic long-stay patients, towards those with less serious, shorter-term problems, who were formerly little catered for by public mental health services. It is not, therefore, that all mental health services have been run down under the guise of community care, rather that resources have largely gone into selected community services, those for acute, less serious mental disorders, and not into those dealing with
partly because of the general shortage of accommodation and partly because of the policy of sorting out the various types of people who had previously been accepted into public assistance institutions [the old workhouses] and of providing them with more specialized forms of care.15
