Mental health care

Abstract

Every society recognizes a distinction between those who do not wish to conform to everyday norms of behaviour and those who cannot so conform even if they wish to. The deviant behaviour of the criminal, the drunk or the clown is of a different order from that of someone who, without reason or purpose, engages in strange, dangerous or disturbing acts. Where the effect of the behaviour is the same — disturbance of public order, danger to the individual concerned or to others — the community’s reaction may be the same, but the history of European societies nevertheless shows that the difference between free and unfree deviant behaviour has gradually been reflected in an increasingly clear difference of approach and regime. In the case of the insane — those who involuntarily act in unacceptable and incomprehensible ways — the chief purpose of mental health care was initially to protect society from maladjusted behaviour. In the nineteenth century there then arose a form of public mental health care with a strongly pedagogical, and later increasingly medical, emphasis.