Deprivation of Liberty in the Shadows of the Institution, Lucy Series

Abstract

Lucy Series is known for her blog ‘The Small Places’. As the work of a Wellcome Trust Fellow, the electronic formats of her latest book have been released for free and thus is likely to gain a wider readership than many monographs. The book provides a history of the legal regulation of institutions dealing with mentally ill people and people with learning disabilities from the nineteenth century onwards and proceeds to an analysis of contemporary developments in the legal status of the people who live in a widening category of quasi-institutions located in that physical and conceptual place commentators sketchily identify as ‘the community’. The book considers the prospects for the implementation of the Liberty Protection Safeguards (LPS) and considers whether the rights of service users are likely to be enhanced or tidily managed away. The book documents a procession of scandals in institutional care, from the incarceration of wealthy heirs in private asylums by relatives at the dawn of the era of regulation to bullying and brutality taking under the noses of regulators in supposedly specialist hospitals such as Winterbourne View as revealed by undercover filming for Panorama in 2011. The creation of supposed places of safety and refuge contributed to new forms of stigma whereby the personhood of patients and residents was undermined and their vulnerability to abuse was increased.