This film is part of Free
The Road Back
A revealing report on the work of the alcohol dependency unit at Withington Hospital, one of the first centres in the UK to offer detoxification programmes.
Overview
This 1978 report on the state of alcohol dependency in the UK focuses on the pioneering work of the detoxification centre at Withington Hospital, one of the first of its kind in the UK. An impressive range of contributors, including the key practitioner Dr. Brian Hore (whom the unit would later be named after), detail the history of alcoholism treatment in the UK, while also exhorting the need for more specialist centres such as Withington’s.
These interviews are interspersed with footage of the police’s various procedures for dealing with the ‘drunk and disorderly’. It’s an enlightening documentary even forty years on, especially in the knowledge that the Brian Hore Unit was finally closed in 2016, as a result of the outsourcing of its functions to the social charity Change Grow Live. This government film is a public record, preserved and presented by the BFI National Archive on behalf of The National Archives, home to more than 1,000 years of British history.
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