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It may be ‘Community’ but is it Comprehensive: A Wrong Question?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

G. E. Langley*
Affiliation:
Exe Vale Hospital, Exeter
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The debate on the place of community psychiatry is conducted as if it were a matter of choosing between service in the community on one hand and hospitals on the other. When expressed as a dichotomy the question, as illustrated by Scull's Dilemma (Jones, 1982), may be unanswerable. Instead, should we not ask what range of co-ordinated services are required to provide a comprehensive service for the mentally disturbed in a geographically-defined community? The key word then becomes comprehensive with community, in the sense of extra-hospital, important but subordinate. The hospital is then seen as part of the service; it is of the community, not alien to it. Other service components need not be anti-hospital, but hospital staff will need to avoid institutionalism and live down prejudice. The debate about what we can afford, although relevant, is separate.

Type
Research Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1983

References

Jones, K. (1982) Scull's Dilemma. British Journal of Psychiatry, 141, 221–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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