Rehabilitation at Roffey Park: Management and psychiatry in occupational mental health, 1943–83

Roffey Park Rehabilitation Centre, which opened in 1943, offered short-term psychiatric treatment for workers suffering from ‘industrial neurosis’. In 1947, Roffey Park opened a training institute to instruct doctors, managers, and trade unionists in occupational mental health and human relations management. The rehabilitation centre's twin institutions generate new insight into the histories of psychiatric and management science in the mid 20th century. While historians have shown how post-war psy-science problematised the family and the child in the creation of democratic citizens, Roffey Park shows that psychiatrists also located the site of social pathology in the workplace. Until the early 1950s, the rehabilitation centre was marked by an optimistic eclecticism that united technologies from psychiatric science, management science, industrial relations, the military, and industrial welfarism. Over the course of the next two decades, prompted by the rehabilitation centre's incorporation into the National Health Service, Roffey Park disintegrated into bounded territories of medical and economic expertise. While historians have explored the welfare state's role in enabling post-war psychiatry, Roffey Park reveals that the institutions of the welfare state struggled to incorporate this experimental site of occupational psychiatry.