Mental Health Services and Community Care. Cummins, Ian

The Spokes Inquiry led to the Griffiths Report (1988), the forerunner of the NHS and Community Care Act (1990).

      Moral panics

      Social work and social workers are often caught up in the moral panics of the day (Butler and Drakeford, 2005). On one level, this given the nature of social work and its liminal position between individuals, families, communities and the wider state, this is not surprising. There was a moral panic about the perceived failings of community care in the late 1980s and 1990s. Community care, in this context, was specifically used as a shorthand for mental health services – other areas of provision were not subject to such scrutiny or detailed media coverage. Cohen’s (1972) notion of a moral panic provides a theoretical lens through which the responses to inquiries into homicides, committed by those with current or some previous contact with mental health services, can be explored. Policing the Crisis (Hall et al, 2013) is a classic study of the way that moral panics reflect wider social and political disquiet. Its discussion of the way that racialised narratives have a key role in many moral panics is important in the mental health field. Hall et al (2013) seek to explore how and why particular themes, including crime and other deviant acts, produce such a reaction. They argue that social and moral issues are much more likely to be the source of these panics. There are certain areas, for example youth culture, drugs or lone parents, where there are recurring panics. The response to this panic includes not only societal control mechanisms, such as the courts, but also the media becoming an important mediating agency between the state and the formation of public opinion.

      There have been a series of moral panics following the deaths of children. Jones (2014) shows the role that the media played in demonising social workers in the aftermath of the death of ‘Baby P’. Warner (2015) highlights that politicians had a key, often inflammatory, role in the developing media coverage. David Cameron and Ed Balls both wrote emotive newspaper columns about the case. In these columns, both politicians made links between their own experiences as fathers and their disgust at the treatment inflicted on ‘Baby P’. Of course, one does not have to be a parent to be repulsed by neglect and abuse of a child. Cameron and Balls were doing this to side with ‘ordinary’ members of the public as opposed to ‘out of touch’ social workers who, in this narrative, had allowed these events to occur.