British healthcare moves in pendulum swings between one extreme and another, often without much material improvement for patients. Just look at how maternity care swung from mostly at home and assisted by midwives before the start of the NHS, to highly-medicalised and doctor-led by the 1960s, and back to a focus on ‘normal birth’ and reducing caesarean rates in more recent years. Very little of that has really helped the women and babies at the centre of the debate. The same is true in mental health, where we have swung from institutionalisation to care in the community without proper resourcing for either, and from stigma and silence to social normalisation, all without many material improvements for the people suffering from severe conditions. Quite often these pendulum swings tend to happen because there isn’t a proper debate about the........

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