At the inception of the NHS on 5 July 1948 the provision of mental health care for people with severe and enduring mental illness (SMI), or psychosis (schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) was concentrated in institutional settings such as hospitals and psychiatric asylums.
Medical practitioners and use of the medical model of psychiatric care held sway. Necessarily, this concentrated on a biological view of SMI and was preoccupied with psychopathology and deficit. This was important, because psychiatric taxonomy implicitly and explicitly shape professional expectation, attribution and input (Bentall, 1990 and 2003; Haddock and Slade, 1996; Velleman Davis et al, 2007).
The zeitgeist then in terms of treatment for SMI was somewhat akin to systemic ‘learned helplessness’ (Seligman, 1975) who later wrote about happiness. A purely medical view of illness such as schizophrenia has received cogent criticism from Bentall (1990 and 2003).