TY - JOUR T1 - Outdoor psychiatry JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 216 LP - 216 DO - 10.3399/bjgp08X279616 VL - 58 IS - 548 AU - Mike Fitzpatrick Y1 - 2008/03/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/58/548/216.1.abstract N2 - In recent years it has become fashionable to decry the policy, initiated in the 1960s and accelerating in the 1980s, of transferring people with long-term mental illness from institutions into various forms of care in the community. Now widely scorned as a policy driven by a convergence between radical anti-psychiatry and reactionary cost-cutting, community care has been blamed for pushing disturbed individuals onto the streets, where, in a number of highly publicised cases, they have killed themselves or other people.‘Care in the community has failed’ the then health minister Frank Dobson told parliament in 1998, in an opportunist invocation of a popular prejudice. I recall thinking that this was a mean-spirited jibe at all those who, over the preceding decades, had striven to release the … ER -