Citizenship and Community in Mental Health: a Joint National Programme for Social Inclusion and Community Partnership
| Pages | 21-24 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/13619322200100026 |
| Date | 01 September 2001 |
| Published date | 01 September 2001 |
| Author | David Morris |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
Focus on…
The Mental Health Review Volume 6 Issue 3 September 2001 ©Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) 2001 21
Citizenship and Community in Mental Health:
a Joint National Programme for Social
Inclusion and Community Partnership
David Morris
Senior Policy Adviser & Head of
Citizenship and Community Programme
Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health
hough a simple aspiration for most people
socially isolated by mental illness, the sense of belong-
ing to a community with all that this can imply for
mutuality and participation remains stubbornly elusive
inspite of community care.
While the community association of people with
disability has been long-held as a practical, value-
based objective for learning disability services, its
transposition into mental health has been rather more
transient.
During the late seventies and early eighties – a
historically brief moment in the long trajectory of
community mental health development – mutually
supportive alliances were understood by the providers
of many community mental health services to be a key
subject for their own agency. Working within a social
services policy context in which services were to be
developed with local involvement, organised in close
association with generic teams and sited alongside
housing services in neighbourhood premises, mental
health staff frequently construed their role as being
comprehensively concerned with meeting the mental
health need of the wider geographical community.
In this important sense, these services were
seeking to incorporate a principle that two decades on
we refer to as social inclusion. That on occasion they
were insufficiently comprehensive adequately to meet
the needs and expectations of people with the most
serious and disabling problems does not detract from
their achievement in advancing a measure of pluralism
in service access. Though rarely, if ever measured,
their added value was in reducing the social distance
between people with different levels of mental
Tdistress and none. In the intention behind these
service designs, we saw some representation in
practice of the fusion between policy on health with
that on neighbourhood, and with their passing went
key opportunities for genuine service integration at
the local community level.
This is a fusion that we are now invited to recreate
in a contemporary, ‘joined-up’ policy context which, in
its emphasis on neighbourhood renewal, creates
favourable opportunity for local community partner-
ship, but this time accompanied by high level national
service expectations, a growing influence for the ideas
of recovery and a human rights agenda substantially
underpinned by disability legislation. If the govern-
ment’s commitment to which John Hutton referred at
the recent chief officers’ conference 1‘to tackle the
dead weight of bigotry and prejudice’ is to be met,
new ways will need to be found to achieve this fusion;
to re-engage these citizens within the wider,
mainstream communities in which they live, work,
play and socially connect.
The functional nature of new services adds weight
to this imperative. If the modern community mental
health services currently in development are to
quickly enjoy the confidence of the local communities
in which their users live, they will need to be demon-
strably safe. For them also to be sound and supportive
requires a focus on proper social integration; on active
local consensus as well as the mere absence of public
resistance and on a reduction in negative discrimina-
tion. This public health focus is not, though, solely a
matter for mental health promotion. Enabling people
with mental illness to achieve the level of social
integration achieved by others means that their
services will need to be sustainable; embedded as an
1 John Hutton, Minister of Health, Chief Officers’ Conference, Birmingham, 21 March 2001.
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