What was the role of moral thought in how the UK's community-based mental health charities approached the return to wellness from 1879 to 1945?

I will examine the role of moral thought in the five community-based mental health charities that operated in the UK
between 1879 and 1945. In these organisations, lay ideas of morality converged with medical psychiatric ideas in
negotiating the meaning of mental wellness. Certainly, charity was seen as an inherently moral endeavour, and activists'
morals were influential in determining how patients should be rehabilitated in society. In investigating how personnel
determined whether a patient was 'better' this work will form a study of mental wellness, thereby differing from traditional
histories of madness. This project will use historical methods to explore philanthropists' motivations for founding and
funding the charities; how charities identified patients for treatment, and the community-based therapeutic methods used.
The work will hence add a new methodological dimension to the history of madness by examining community or
'onlooker' experiences, as well as those of practitioners, patients and relatives. This project will make explicit the ethical
implications arising from the historical investigation. The charities pursued some policies that today seem obviously
unethical. Rather than pass judgement, this project will examine how and why such decisions were made. In illuminating
the medical, social and economic factors affecting past actors' moral reasoning, this work could generate new questions
to encourage critical ethical reasoning in charities today