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Together, UK Mental Health Charity working alongside each person with mental health issues on their journey towards greater wellbeing. Trusted experts in service user involvement

Our history

Together is the UK’s oldest community mental health charity. It was formed in 1879 by Rev Henry Hawkins, the hospital chaplain at an asylum in Middlesex, and was originally known as The After-care Association for Poor and Friendless Female Convalescents on Leaving Asylums for the Insane.

Initially, the association helped find temporary homes and placements in service for women coming out of asylums, working alongside them as they tried to regain a normal life. Soon after, it began preventative work by placing ‘people at risk of becoming insane’ in cottage homes and set up the first residential care home in England for people with mental health problems.

The association went on to help patients of both sexes through the Great Depression and both World Wars, listening to people’s needs and finding them homes and jobs. During this time, the organisation remained independent despite pressure to be assimilated into a single national body. It believed that consolidation would prevent it from continuing with its service user-led ethos. It issued a ground-breaking report that showed the vast majority of people with mental health problems were able to hold down jobs and only prejudice prevented them from working.

Throughout the 60s and 70s with large psychiatric hospitals closing in favour of caring for people in the community, the association, now registered under the name MACA, The Mental After Care Association, began to diversify its care. In the 1980s it adopted the ‘social care model’ to encourage service users to make choices about all aspects of their lives, from meals to medication. The organisation began to place more emphasis on staff training and became one of the first voluntary sector organisations to pioneer NVQs. The range of services offered by the association continued to broaden in the 1990s, and in 1998 it changed its name to Together, reflecting the scope of its work, which now included education, research and campaigning.

Since 2000, at Together we have expanded the range of services we provide even further. We ran our first assertive-outreach and personal-development services; opened our first crisis house; and were contracted to run several Supporting People programmes to help those with mental health problems living in the community.

From the very beginnings, we have placed individuals at the centre of everything we do. In 2004, this approach led to the creation of our unique Service User Involvement Directorate; through the directorate, service users directly inspire and influence our work and decisions.

The current social care reforms, which aim at giving service users greater control through personalisation, fit perfectly with our principles of offering individually tailored care and listening to the voice of experience. Responding to change during a period of over a century, we have grown to become trusted experts in service user involvement and are leading the debate on service user leadership in the personalisation agenda.

Further reading

The full story of Together’s growth and development over more than a century in mental health care is told in 'Community Care in the Making: A History of Together 1879–2000'. To order the paperback for £5 (including postage and packing) email malcolm-macfarlane@together-uk.org or send your payment (cheques made payable to Together) to Together, 12 Old Street, London EC1V 9BE (020 7780 7300).

You can find out more about Henry Hawkins by reading this address by former Together trustee, Dr David Abrahamson, and by downloading this leaflet.

Together’s archives

Together’s archives are kept in the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre in the Library at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (ref SA/MAC).