Timeline of Mental Healthcare

1766 Manchester Lunatic Asylum, a private asylum, opens in Piccadilly

1798 Lord Chancellor appoints Secretary of Lunatics, Clerk of Custody of Idiots and Lunatics,

and 5 Commissioners for Lunatics

1800 Criminal Lunatics Act designed to give safe custody to lunatics charged with criminal

offences

1801 King George III suffers recurring bouts of insanity

1808 County Asylums Act – first law to allow counties to raise funding to build public asylums

for housing lunatics out of prisons and workhouses

1816 The Lancashire Moor Asylum, the first public asylum in Lancashire, opens.

1842 Lunacy Commission considers case for two new asylums for Lancashire – Rainhill in

Liverpool and Prestwich in Manchester

1843 Attacks by criminal insane prompts calls for lunatics to be treated in asylums for their

own protection and general public safety

1844 Lunacy Report counts 12,000 insane paupers, some dangerous, living in workhouses or

outside asylums; recommends lunatics should be cured and controlled with discipline and

moral management

1845 County Asylums Act obliges all insane poor to be transferred from workhouses and treated

in specially built asylums

1845 Lunacy Act requires monitoring and regulation of all lunatic asylums

1851 Lancashire opens a second County Asylum at Prestwich for 350 patients

1858 Prestwich County Asylum has 510 patients

1863 Prestwich extended to accommodate a further 560 patients

1870 Royal Albert Asylum for Idiots and Imbeciles of the

Northern Counties opens in Lancaster, specialising

in training for children with

mental disability

1884 Prestwich Annexe opens to accommodate 1,100 patients

1886 Idiots Act - first law to make provision for education and training for those with mental

disability, rather than illness or insanity

1888 Colonies for epileptics begin to open in many areas of the country, a concept which

marked out mental hospitals as institutions segregated from ordinary communities

1890 Lunacy Act consolidated several legal changes on mental illness. Detention of a lunatic

person could only be ordered by a judge and must be limited by time; new private asylum

building was restricted

1899 Defective and Epileptic Children Act allows all councils to make special arrangements

for teaching or training mentally disabled children

1903 Prestwich County Asylum can accommodate 3,125 patients

1905 Manchester Corporation opens Langho Colony, in Lancashire,

a residential home for epileptics

1905 Syphilis bacteria identified, thought to be major cause of

General Paralysis of the Insane, and much mental illness

1907 Eugenics Education Society established to promote population

control measures on undesirable genetic traits, including mental defects

1908 Report by Royal Commission on Care and Control of Feeble-Minded

1913 Mental Deficiency Act established Board of Control to replace the Lunacy Commission.

Every council required to set up Mental Deficiency Committee to provide for mentally

disabled people under 4 categories: ‘idiot’, ‘imbecile’, ‘feeble-minded’ and ‘moral defective’

(under which unmarried mothers could be detained in asylums)

1919 Prince John, son of King George V, dies aged 13. Epileptic and learning disabled,

his existence was largely unknown to the rest of the country

1924-26 Royal Commission on Lunacy and Mental Disorder recommends more modern treatment

of mental illness and limits asylum patient numbers and certification

1927 Mental Deficiency (Amendment) Act distinguishes between mental impairment from

birth and as a result of accident or illness. Local councils responsible for providing

training for those with mental disability

1930 Mental Treatment Act modernises existing laws relating to mental patients, aiming

to promote voluntary treatment of all patients, whether private or rate-aided (pauper),

rather than detention or certification. This Act made a crucial change in amending

legal terminology from ‘lunatic’ to ‘person of unsound mind’.