First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In The Poor Law of Lunacy, Peter Bartlett examines the legal and administrative regime of the 19th-century asylum, arguing that it is to be thought of as an aspect of English poor law in which the medical superintendent of the asylum has little power. The text also examines the place of the county asylum movement in the poor law debates of the mid-19th century. Using the Leicestershire asylum as a case study, the author looks at the role of the poor law officers in the admission processes of the asylum, and relations between poor law staff, asylum staff and the poor law and lunacy central inspectorates.

First published in 2006. A private madhouse can be defined as a privately owned establishment for the reception and care of insane persons, conducted as a business proposition for the personal profit of the proprietor or proprietors. The history of such establishments in England and Wales can be traced for a period of over three and a half centuries, from the early seventeenth century up to the present day. This volume is a study of private madhouses in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Ten years have passed since the Mental Health Act (MHA) 2007 came into force in England. An amending statute, the Act reformed the MHA 1983 and reshaped the law governing the compulsory care and treatment of people suffering from mental disorders. Primarily driven by concerns about risk, it sought to remove legalistic obstacles to civil commitment and extend the law's coercive reach into the community. At the time of its introduction, the 2007 Act was written off as a retrograde step and a missed opportunity for radical, rights-focused reform. Despite this, little attention has been paid to its impact in the years since. Published to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the 2007 Act, this book offers a timely evaluation of mental health law and policy in England. It argues that the current MHA defies easy categorisation within any of the descriptive models which have customarily narrated the mechanics of civil commitment, namely 'legalism', 'new legalism', and 'medicalism'. It therefore makes the case for a new model – new medicalism – to account for the 2007 Act's enhancement of the discretion of mental health professionals for the express purposes of facilitating the management of situations of risk. In doing so, the book: critically examines the problems inherent in civil commitment frameworks organised around the concept of risk; explores the theoretical foundations of new medicalism; considers the challenges facing proponents of future reform in the era of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; and, reflects on the 2007 Act's practical impact.