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Prevalence of schizophrenia in a refuge for homeless men: a five year follow-up

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Maree Teesson  and
Neil Buhrich
Maree Teesson*
Affiliation:
Inner City Mental Health Service, Sydney, Australia
Neil Buhrich
Affiliation:
St Vincent's Hospital, and Clinical Coordinator, Inner City Mental Health Service, Sydney, New South Wales
*
Ms M. Teesson, Clinical Research Unit for Anxiety Disorders, St Vincent's Hospital, 299 Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, NSW 2010, Australia
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Until the mid 1950s, the management of persons suffering from chronic mental illness in Australia was the responsibility of the large mental hospital. With the advent of psychotropic drugs and concern about the ‘negative’ influence of the institutional environment on patients there was a shift to shorter but more frequent periods of hospital admission. As the pattern of shorter admissions increased, community services for the mentally ill were expanded in the early 1970s. Between 1950 and 1985 in the state of New South Wales, the numbers of patients in large mental hospitals decreased from 256 to 55 per 100 000 population. However, no special arrangements for accommodation, as distinct from treatment, were made for these ex-mental hospital patients. The decline in hospital numbers can be attributed to a general reduction in the length of hospital stays. Initially, there seemed to be no pressing need for extra accommodation in the community as the provision of social security benefits was adequate to allow patients without homes to afford basic accommodation, a situation different to that in the United States (Lamb, 1984).

Type
Articles
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 14 , Issue 10 , October 1990 , pp. 597 - 600
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1990

Footnotes

A full list of references is available on request from Dr Teesson.

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