Perceval's two books about his experience in asylums were republished by anthropologist Gregory Bateson in 1962,[2] and in recent years he has been hailed as a pioneer of the mental health advocacy movement.
[2] Perceval attended Harrow School and spent a year with a private tutor before obtaining an army commission, first in a cavalry regiment and then as a captain in the First Foot or Grenadier Guards.
A sober and religious man, Perceval felt increasingly out of place in the army and, in 1830, sold his commission and enrolled at Hertford College, Oxford.
Instead he embarked on a spiritual journey to Scotland, visiting a radical evangelical sect at Row who spoke in tongues and were said to perform miracles.
He left Scotland to visit friends in Ireland, where he became disillusioned with religion, had sex with a prostitute, and was treated with mercury for a sexually transmitted infection.
At this stage - it was December 1830 and he was 27 years old - his behaviour became so bizarre that his friends had him restrained and his eldest brother Spencer came to take him back to England and put him in a lunatic asylum.
It was published in 1838 under the title "A narrative of the treatment experienced by a Gentleman during a state of mental derangement designed to explain the causes and nature of insanity, and to expose the injudicious conduct pursued towards many unfortunate sufferers under that calamity."
[2] Perceval spent the rest of his life campaigning for the reform of the lunacy laws and for better treatment of asylum inmates, once referring to himself as "the attorney general of Her Majesty's madmen".
The aims of the Society, as set out in their first annual report, were to protect people from wrongful confinement or cruel and improper treatment, and bring about reform of the law.
[10] Patients he helped included the German academic Edward Peithman who had been locked up in Bethlem for 14 years after annoying Prince Albert.
He also delivered lectures; 1 May 1854 at the Kings Arms Tavern in Kensington High Street he addressed 24 respectable-looking people and an undercover policeman on the need for reform of the lunacy laws.
[1] In 1859, after many years of petitioning the government, the Alleged Lunatic's Friend Society finally achieved one of its main aims, a parliamentary hearing.
Hunter and Ida Macalpine who concentrated on Perceval's activism, describing him as someone who "played a significant role at a crucial period in psychiatric history by his fearless and honest exposure of himself as well as what he considered the shortcomings of his time" and whose work was "prophetic in the accuracy of its prevision of present-day developments in mental health policy".
Perceval's Narrative continues to be studied by those interested in what it reveals about psychosis and recovery;[6][16] whilst his activism has been inspirational for the peer advocacy movement.