I know of a case wherein a once-comfortable man went broke paying for psychiatric care for his wife in the US (Uncle Ronnie had just shut off funding).
A question occurs:
She was a British Subject - had she been sent to her old home town (and/or surviving relatives), would she have been accepted for in-house (she had become violent) treatment at little or no expense to husband (who is not a Subject, but a US Citizen)?
FWIW: Once cured, she was put on a one-way flight to UK with instructions to never bother him again. 'Tad late, aren’t we?
The OP probably means that the woman concerned was what is nowadays terms a British Citizen, but at the time - depending on what the time was - was termed a Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies.
The answer is that entitlement to treatment under the NHS depends not on citizenship, but on residency.
If you are lawfully in the UK - and of course as a British Citizen this woman could have entered the UK lawfully - there are a range of treatments you can get on the NHS without any further residence requirement. The range includes compulsory psychiatric treatment, so if the woman had gone to the UK and been sectioned she would have been treated immediately, for free. She would only be sectioned if, on account of a mental illness, she was a danger to herself or others.
For non-compulsory treatment, the NHS would have provided if the woman had been ordinarily resident in the UK, or had arrived in order to take up permanent residence , or if she had been in the UK for more than twelve months and had not come for the purpose of getting medical treatment. So if the man had divorced his wife, and she had returned to the UK intending to remain there permanently because she no longer had any reason to be in the US, she would have been treated immediately.
Thanks - by the time she was institutionalized, I doubt if she could have pulled that off by herself.
If she were single, got off the plane and immediately attacked the nearest person, would she have been taken in and locked up immediately? If she was a resident for a year, I’m guessing no question.
I didn’t know UK people had stopped being Subjects - when did you become Citizens, and how many rules have you created to identify how many different kinds of “Citizen”?
She would have been taken in and charged with assault. As a prisoner, she would have received any necessary medical treatment for free. At some point the question would come up as to whether her mental illness precluded her being charged, or precluded her from being tried if charged, or gave her the possibility of a defence if tried. Assume that somewhere along the way as a result of one of these considerations the criminal proceedings against her come to an end; she is then released. Presumably, because of the treatment she got in prison, she is not an immediate danger to herself or others. She lives unsupported in the community, with some minimal contact with social services. Or, she has support from family in the UK. At some point, in all likelihood, her condition deteriorates, and there is another arrest. Rinse and repeat. It’s not a good model for best practice in mental health treatment. The issue, in fairness, may not simply be the cost to her of mental health treatment; it may be her willingness to accept treatment. It’s not unknown for mentally ill people with minimal family or community support to refuse treatment, or stop treatment, until their condition deteriorates to the point where they are sectioned.
From the late 1940s, “British Subject” was an overarching term to describe people who held citizenship in any Commonwealth Country - so Australian Citizens, Canadian Citizens, NZ Citizens, Indian Citizens, etc, were all “British Subjects”. (“Commonwealth Citizen” was an alternative term with the same meaning.) When this framework was introduced they all had a right of entry into the UK, but through the 1950s and 1960s that was progressively stripped away. Increasingly, right of entry/abode in the UK depended on “patriality” - being born in the UK, or having a parent or grandparent born there.
One category of British Subject was “Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies”. CUKCs too were subejct to patriality requirements to enter and live in the UK. This citizenship was itself gradually dismantled; as colonies became independent people would lose CUKC status and become, e.g., Citizens of Jamaica.
The whole thing was rejigged in about 1981. “British subject” as an overarching term was dropped, and CUKC status was abolished and replaced with a number of distinct citizenships - British Citizen, British Overseas Citizen, British Dependent Territories Citizen, etc. But “British Subject” didn’t disappear entirely; the term remains for a small group of people who had British Subject status in the past and have never acquired the citizenship of any Commonwealth country. Nobody has ever bothered to count the number of British Subjects now remaining, so far as I know, but it’s pretty small. Most of those that remain are Irish citizens. As the category is closed and is not heritable, when the present British Subjects die it will disappear entirely.