Community care: a brief overview

This short chapter provides a brief overview of the development of community care. It examines the way that the asylum became an obsolete institution - certainly one that few defenders in the early 1980s. In giving a brief overview of the intellectual underpinnings of community care, the chapter introduces a series of issues such as: deinstitutionalisation and the penal state, community care inquiries and the asylum/community binary that are examined in depth in subsequent chapters. Community care is a complex and highly influential shift in mental health services. As with all policies, there were a series of drivers behind the policy - a combination of progressive idealism that attacked the whole notion that institutions could ever provide humane, dignified care and fiscal conservatism