Psychiatry in Britain
H. J. WALTON M.D., M.R.C.P.E., D.P.M.1
1 Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychiatry, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland
The National Health Service has become the work setting for most British psychiatrists; of the main subspecialties only psychoanalysis remains outside. Only about five percent of first admissions to hospitals with a diagnosis of schizophrenia now become long-stay patients, contrasted with 70 percent in 1930. Discharge to the community has not created a problem. Hospital and community psychiatrists, teachers of psychiatry, and researchers share a mood of lively self-appraisal which also contains an openness to new knowledge and a readiness for necessary change.
