John Thomas Perceval

John Thomas Perceval, born 1803, was a British pioneer whose work for the mental health advocacy movement led to lasting improvements in mental health care.

=Early life=John Thomas Perceval was born in February 1803, the fifth son of 12 children. His father Spencer Perceval was the only British Prime Minister to have been assassinated. John Thomas was aged nine at the time. A year earlier his father had revived the regency after George III’s second bout of madness started in October 1810. It is not clear what effect these events may have had on John Thomas’s own mental health in later life. Little is known about John Thomas’s early life, but his mother remarried in about 1814 at the age of 45 and became “Lady Carr”. She was to live for another 50 years.

John’s eldest brother (also called Spencer) was an MP in three different constituencies between 1818 and 1832. From 1826 Spencer had shown increasing interest in the religious doctrines of Edward Irving, including predicting the imminent second coming of Christ. He was an active Metropolitan Lunacy Commissioner from 1830 but, with the passing of the Reform Act in 1832, he was not reappointed to this post when he ceased to be an MP. By this point his religious speeches in the House of Commons were already regarded as ‘odd’ and he became more closely involved with the Irvingite Church from 1833.

="Narrative of the treatment of a gentleman"=John Thomas Perceval first came to public attention in 1838 when he published his ‘Narrative’, an account of his own madness from 1830 and his incarceration in two private asylums from January 1831 to early 1834 [ Perceval, J.T. (1838). A narrative of the treatment experienced by a gentleman, during a state of mental derangement. London, Wilson.] . A second version was published in 1840. In 1961 these two parts were brought together and republished, with an introduction, by Gregory Bateson [ Bateson, G. (1961). Perceval’s narrative: A patient’s account of his psychosis 1830–1832. Stanford: Stanford University Press.] .

Perceval had resigned his commission in the Grenadier Guards in 1830 as his mental health difficulties increased. He then spent a term at Oxford University, went to Scotland to search out the Irvingites but by Christmas 1830 was insane. He found his way to Dublin and had to be brought back by his brother Spencer. He was committed to Brislington House, a private asylum in Bristol, in January1831.

Brislington House was less reliant on restraint than the well-known public asylums such as Bethlem, In such private asylums standards of care were considerably higher - in some circumstances even servants were permitted. Brislington House could be afforded by the Perceval’s only because Parliament had settled a £50,000 capital grant on the children after their father’s assassination. In May 1832 Perceval was transferred to Ticehurst Asylum in Sussex and he remained there until he was well enough to be discharged in early 1834.

Perceval’s account of his oen llness in his ‘Narrative’ reinforces the importance of a patient self-help, taking the view that, since the patient knows most about his mental health, his views should not be discounted nor his behaviour penalised by restraint. A modern diagnosis of Perceval’s condition might be ‘paranoid schizophrenia’, although this could not have been understood or described in these terms in the 1830s.

=Recovery and campaign work=Perceval married in March 1834 shortly after his discharge and was to become the father of four daughters. From that point to his death in 1876 he dedicated himself to improving mental health treatment, and ‘the care and conditions of the insane’. He described himself as ‘the attorney-general of all Her Majesty’s madmen’. His legacy as a mental health reformer has lasted to the present day and has been influential throughout Europe.

Perceval helped to found the Alleged Lunatics Friends Society in 1845 and became its secretary the following year. He campaigned to increase parliamentary opposition to the 1845 Acts (Lunacy and Regulation of Lunatic Asylums), petitioning against the first of these. In 1859 he gave evidence to the Select Committee on the operation of asylums. This was to report in 1860, and recognised the significance of increased liberty and the rights of ‘lunatics’. John Thomas had campaigned for both, arguing that continuing to see friends and family could be an important step on the road to recovery. His work thus prefigured subsequent developments in mental health, and even the entitlements to normal life enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. [ Gault, H. (2008), An expert by experience”, The Psycholgist, Vol 21, No. 5, May 2008.]

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