ABSTRACT
Historically, state rehabilitation and resettlement services for the mentally ill have evolved from services for the physically disabled. That is why the process has been so slow and the results so unsatisfactory. Mentally ill people were not deliberately excluded, they were simply not thought of. The reason was that in the 1940s, when the Tomlinson Committee was set up as an interdepartmental committee for the rehabilitation and resettlement of disabled persons, the public’s concern was for people injured in war. At the same time the custodial care then available to psychiatric patients did little to suggest that they too might require rehabilitation services on a wide scale. Therefore, when the Disabled Persons’ (Employment) Act of 1944 gave effect to the Tomlinson recommendations, a pattern of services was set up which has lasted without substantial overhaul for thirty-five years, during which the increasing numbers of the mentally ill have continued to some extent to be regarded as deviants, tiresomely refusing to conform to the standards of the physically disabled. One is reminded of Professor Higgins’ sentiment in My Fair Lady: ‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’
