The Box is a major cultural and heritage attraction and archive, which opened in Plymouth’s city centre in September 2020. Its collection, formally the South West Film and Television Archive (SWFTA), is the regional film archive for the South West of England, comprising the combined programme libraries of Westward Television and Television South West (TSW). It also includes a significant number of donated film collections dating back to the early 1890s.
This film is part of Free
Training Centre for the Disabled in St Austell
Visitors look around a new training centre for the disabled in St Austell.
In partnership with:
Overview
The 1959 Mental Health Act repealed the Mental Deficiency Acts and espoused community care paving the way for more small scale residential training centres. The new law also meant some residents were admitted to centres on a voluntary basis unless seen as a danger to themselves, which subsequently became known as being sectioned. The 1959 Act used terms such as subnormal, severely subnormal and backward deemed acceptable by lawmakers at the time.
In 1961 the government announced the wide scale closure of mental institutions and a 1962 report highlighted hospital scandals in the mental health sector. The Hospital Plan for England and Wales included plans to develop hostels and sheltered accommodation. In 1986 the first closure of a large long-stay institution for people with learning difficulties was the Western Counties Institution at Starcross in Exeter. Today, it is more common to talk about intellectual and developmental disabilities for the learning disabled. Campaigners continue to highlight difficulties with the present voting system still being discriminatory against the learning disabled and mentally challenged.
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