An Act to make further and better provision for the care of Feeble-minded and other Mentally Defective Persons and to amend the Lunacy Acts.
Citation
3 & 4 Geo. 5. c. 28
Dates
Royal assent
15 August 1913
Other legislation
Repealed by
Mental Health Act 1959
Status: Repealed
The Mental Deficiency Act 1913 (3 & 4 Geo. 5. c. 28) was an act of Parliament of the United Kingdom creating provisions for the institutional treatment of people deemed to be "feeble-minded" and "moral defectives".[1] People deemed "mentally defective" under this Act could be locked up indefinitely in a "mental deficiency colony", despite not being diagnosed with any mental illness or disability, or committing any crime.[2]
In the late 1940s, the National Council for Civil Liberties discovered that 50,000 people were locked up under this Act, and that 30% of them had been locked up for 10-20 years already.[2] The Act remained in effect until it was repealed by the Mental Health Act 1959,[3] but people detained under this Act were still being discovered in institutions as late as the 1990s.[4][5]
^"Mental Health (History) Dictionary". Studymore. Retrieved 13 July 2012.
^ abWise, Sarah (2024). The Undesirables: The Law That Locked Away A Generation. Great Britain: Oneworld. pp. vii. ISBN 9780861544554.
^Jan Walmsley, "Women and the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913: citizenship, sexuality and regulation", British Journal of Learning Disabilities, 28 (2000), 65.
^Wise 2024, p. 267.
^Beesley, Ian (26 February 2024). "Taken in 1996 photo of Dolly who was incarcerated in the Moor Psychiatric Hospital for having an illegitimate child in her early teens, she never left and died about a year after I took her photo". X.
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