Citizenship and learning disabled people: The mental health charity MIND’s 1970s campaign in historical context

Toms, Jonathan (2017) Citizenship and learning disabled people: The mental health charity MIND’s 1970s campaign in historical context. Medical History, 61 (4). pp. 481-499. ISSN 0025-7273

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Abstract

Current policy and practice directed towards people with learning disabilities originates in the deinstitutionalisation processes, civil rights concerns and integrationist philosophies of the 1970s and 1980s. However, historians know little about the specific contexts within which these were mobilised. Although it is rarely acknowledged in the secondary literature, MIND was prominent in campaigning for rights-based services for learning disabled people during this time. This article sets MIND’s campaign within the wider historical context of the organisation’s origins as a main institution of the inter-war mental hygiene movement. The article begins by outlining the mental hygiene movement’s original conceptualisation of ‘mental deficiency’ as the antithesis of the self-sustaining and responsible individuals that it considered the basis of citizenship and mental health. It then traces how this equation became unravelled, in part by the altered conditions under the post-war Welfare State, in part by the mental hygiene movement’s own theorising. The final section describes the reconceptualisation of citizenship that eventually emerged with the collapse of the mental hygiene movement and the emergence of MIND. It shows that representations of MIND’s rights-based campaigning (which have, in any case, focused on mental illness) as individualist, and fundamentally opposed to medicine and psychiatry, are inaccurate. In fact, MIND sought a comprehensive community-based service, integrated with the general health and welfare services and oriented around a reconstruction of learning disabled people’s citizenship rights.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: learning disability,mental hygiene,citizenship,mind,deinstitutionalisation,sdg 3 - good health and well-being ,/dk/atira/pure/sustainabledevelopmentgoals/good_health_and_well_being
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of History
Related URLs:
Depositing User: Pure Connector
Date Deposited: 14 Oct 2017 05:06
Last Modified: 03 Aug 2023 13:30
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/65132
DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2017.55

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