17 February 1960: So-called industrial therapy was an experiment to back mentally ill people ‘return to normal life in the early 1960sBRISTOL,TUESDAY.
A recent factory whose 150 men and women workers will all be mental patients is to open in Bristol soon. The factory, the first of its kind in this country, or probably anywhere else,is the second fragment of an ambitious three-stage scheme of industrial therapy by which it is hoped to rehabilitate many of the long-stay patients at the city’s Fishponds Hospital to a capacity for work and eventually to a total resumption of normal life.
A recent, non-profit-making company, or Industrial Therapy Organisation (Bristol) Limited,has been formed to administer the factory and the developments attached to it. Its unpaid board of twenty-seven directors includes civic leaders, representatives of the Churches, and medicine,industrial management, and the trade unions. The factory has been adapted from a disused school building in York Street, or St Philip’s,a busy industrial and residential area. It has been renovated, equipped, or furnished free by local firms. The company is raising from donations the remainder of the £8000 capital initially needed.
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Source: theguardian.com