You can take Stig out of the dump, but can you take the dump out of Stig?

With the Olympic Games coming to London at the time of writing, summer 2012, and the country in economic crisis, the government is attempting to clean up the streets at the same time as cutting services by instructing mental illness to behave itself and meet mad targets. This leaves the mentally ill at most risk of being dumped. Following the dismantling over two decades ago of out-of-sight asylums, most care of the chronically mentally ill has been in registered care homes in the community. The legal definition of a care home is an establishment that provides accommodation with personal care, including assistance with bodily functions where required www.caremanagementmatters.co.uk/documents/PeterGrose.pdf. ‘Registration is a legal requirement under the Health and Social Care Act 2008 for all health and adult social care providers to register with the Care Quality Commission.’ (forum.ukqcs.co.uk/home/forum/topic/36/8/1/17/) However, in an attempt at reducing budgets, under the guise of cutting red tape and enhancing empowerment and independence, there is a proposal to deregister these housing associations by insisting that their customers become independent of the following needs: personal care, having their medication supervised, and having limited access to and responsibility for money. If a care home is deregistered then, in agreement with residents, the provision of residential accommodation, together with nursing or personal care, is discontinued, and instead these two elements are provided separately and tenancy agreements are put in place in the form of ‘supported housing’. It is expected that the primary task of support workers will adapt to empowering the charges in ‘their care’ so that self-responsibility on the part of the mentally ill will increase. The difficulty is that the nature of mental illness would seem to make this impossible, which makes the demands themselves mad.