Quote Originally Posted by Bluebina View Post
The World has changed so much over the last 50 years, there didn't seem nearly as many mental health issues when I was younger, or maybe there was and I wasn't aware?

Could it be that people are less mentally strong than they were many years ago?
50 years ago, there were huge mental health hospitals that took care (in most cases) of the mentally ill. There were some bad incidents with the types of treatment some patients were subjected to though, but in the main, mental health was a hidden subject.

For example, when I lived and worked in North London, there were 3 very large mental health hospitals within a 15 mile radius of where I was living, the biggest being Friern Barnet Hospital (Which boasted the longest single corridor in the World and is now a block of luxury flats). None of them exist anymore. When I was a teenager, in the Bridgend Borough, there were three mental health hospitals - Glanrhyd; Penyfai and Parc (The prison is built on the site of Parc Hospital). Now there is only one.

Fast forward to the late 1980's and Thatcher introduced "Care in the Community" which led to vulnerable and sometimes dangerous (to themselves and the general public) patients being placed into the community. One of the most famous incidents of this was a man called Christopher Clunis who murdered a complete stranger on the London underground in 1992.

Mental illness was hidden, people were ashamed if one of their relatives was in a mental health institute.