‘Large scale institutional care for the mentally ill was essentially a 19th century phenomenon’ (Hickey et al, 2003:13), where policy was to institutionalise all people who were deemed mentally ill. However, this soon changed in the late 1900’s where community care became the norm. Only those who were acutely ill were to be hospitalised, for everyone else community care was seen as an positive alternative. Most patients that were hospital residents were voluntary and were not in any way constrained as such on the hospital premises. However remarkably, as stated by Prior, 1993 ‘ patients were quite content to remain in hospital (p163), and would make remarks that they were not ‘ready to go’. A few patients did however, claim that people in the outside world ‘often laughed at them and they therefore felt happier in the hospital grounds where everyone knows who we are’ (Prior, 1993:163). In order to understand mental illness we need to look at the four different perspectives outwith sociology which are psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychology and the legal framework. Phychiatry ‘is a speciality within medicine’ (Rogers & Pilgrim, 2005, p2). Psychiatrics are trained invididuals who deal with people with mental illness where they have the job of ‘identifying sick individuals, predicting their future course of their illness, speculating about its cause and prescribing a response to its condition’ (Rogers & Pilgrim, 2005, p2). Psychiatrics favour to go down the path of curing their patients through biological treatments. The illness framework is a prevailing framework in mental health services that deals with ‘symptons, not signs’ (Rogers & Pilgrim, 2005). The way that they tell whether a person is mentally ill or well is through a person’s communication. Mental diagnosis is heavily relied on by symptons with ‘the absence of detectable bodily signs’ (Rogers & Pilgrim, 2005, p3). The second perspective outwith sociology is psychoanalysis which was founded by Sigmund...