ABSTRACT
The development of rehabilitation psychiatry Rehabilitation psychiatrists in the UK date the origins of their trade to the opening in 1796 of the Retreat in York by the Quaker merchant William Tuke. This institution pioneered what came to be known as ‘moral treatment’ for, as Tuke described the client group, ‘people deprived of their reason’. The Retreat offered humane care in an environment that resembled a family, with a strong emphasis on encouraging people to be active and to take responsibility for themselves, while at the same time managing risk. The Retreat became the model for the Asylum, in the early nineteenth century a cutting-edge and evidence-based techno - logy for promoting the recovery of people experiencing episodes of what we now term ‘severe mental illness’. Discharge rates from the early asylums were impressive, although by the latter part of the nineteenth century the asylums had entered their ‘long sleep’, losing their initial impetus for recovery and discharge.
