The ‘Mesozoic’ Table of the Forms: Admissions Reform 1942–1948
摘要
In 1948, the Table of the Forms of Mental Disorder would be replaced by the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) for psychological diagnosis in mental health statistics. This marks the formal end of the Table of the Forms, along with the end of Poor Law system’s management of asylum statistics as they came under the jurisdiction of the newly introduced National Health Service (NHS). Changes to admissions procedures to psychiatric institutions accompanied the NHS’s introduction, which were designed during the Second World War in a project co-ordinated by psychiatrist Lionel Penrose and the psychologist Carlos Patton Blacker between 1942 and 1944. Their work included a review of the way patient data had been collected during asylum admissions procedures, with Blacker describing the Table of the Forms as a ‘Mesozoic’ relic of psychiatry’s past. Their report recommended the mental health section of the general medical nosology developed by the Royal College of Physicians be used as the standard in these new data collection procedures, a document that formulated the basis of the inaugural classification of the World Health Organisation in 1948. The adoption of the ICD signalled a broader alignment of psychiatry to general medicine that had also occurred with the formation of the National Health Service, and the formation of the World Health Organisation (WHO). This chapter then serves as conclusion of the story of the Table of the Forms and asylum medical statistics.