Enoch Powell was probably one of Britain’s most ferociously intellectual politicians. He’s known now mostly for his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech which denounced mass migration and which some have called ‘prophetic’ and others have called ‘rabble rousing’. However what is less known is Enoch Powell’s championing of the policy of closing down the mental asylums and instead treating those with mental illnesses ‘in the community’.

Some now are starting to look at the Care In the Community programmes and are seeing them as an utter disaster for mentally ill people. There is no longer a safe space where those with mental illness can be treated and where these individuals can be kept from exploitation, homelessness and substance abuse.

Phillip Pilkington, writing in the Critic magazine has examined the revolution that occurred in the mental health field in the fifties and sixties and how psychiatric revolutionaries like RD Laing pushed for community care for the mentally ill. Mr Pilkington also examines how politicians like Powell allowed themselves to be manipulated into supporting a policy that has utterly failed and has led to mass numbers of the mentally ill becoming homeless, living with and dying with addiction problems and brought into the world of crime by being exploited by criminals. Also closing down the asylums and having those with mental illnesses relying on a variety of psychiatric drugs has been a boon for the pharmaceutical industry. We are still living with the naivety that mental health issues can be cured by drugs alone and the cynicism of the policy makers who saw the closure of mental health hospitals as a fiscal saving for the public sector.

Mr Pilkington said:

As with so much that happened in the 1960s, the forces of change were not the counterculture alone. Commercial and governmental interests inevitably played a role — in the case of the closure of the asylums, that role was large and probably determinate. In 1961, one year after R.D. Laing had published his first book attacking the medicalisation of the mentally ill, the Minister for Health Enoch Powell gave a speech that has since become known as the “Water Tower speech”. Powell was under the sway of statisticians at the Ministry who were studying the efficacy of new psychiatric drugs. He thought that because of these drugs, within 15 years many psychiatric beds would be decommissioned. “This is a colossal undertaking,” Powell said in his speech, “not so much in the new physical provision which it involves, but in the sheer inertia of mind and matter which is required to be overcome.” The 1960s were such a decade of promise and change that even archconservatives like Powell got caught up in it all — it speaks volumes that his rhetoric would not have looked out of place in a countercultural sit-in.

As I said earlier Powell was ferociously high achieving intellectually but he was not clever enough to not allow himself to be influenced by Civil Servants, accountants, mental health ‘experts’ like RD Laing and pharmaceutical companies into giving his blessing for a policy that can truly be seen as an utter and complete disaster especially for those with mental health issues. Powell’s part in this policy disaster should not be forgotten and the next time that you see a military veteran homeless and living with mental health issues or a distressed woman ranting at traffic or her own internally generated demons, it’s probably right to remember that blame for the horrific state of Britain’s mental health system should be aimed at Enoch Powell. If he had not acquiesced to the statisticians, the self appointed mental health gurus and the pharmaceutical industry, then maybe those people with severe mental illnesses who now live or rather exist in homeless encampments self medicating with alcohol or street drugs, would have had their conditions properly treated in a hospital. I find it difficult to disagree with Mr Pilkington’s call to reopen the asylums and have effective and humane treatment for those with mental illnesses and stop leaving those with serious mental illnesses to destroy themselves and suffer more than they need to. We do not and should not revert to the sometimes cruel and abusive asylums of the past but surely a well run and humanely operated hospital is better than dying of drugs, alcohol or suicide in the street?