The official website of David Austin, author of Delivered Unto Lions, a factually-based novel concerning the traumatic experience of a 12-year-old boy admitted to a residential mental health unit in the 1970s. One day this child is a relatively ordinary schoolboy – albeit an unsettled and unhappy one – and the next he is a mental patient surrounded by violent behaviour, eating disorders, self-harm and unsympathetic nursing staff. Based on the author’s own experience as a patient in the Merrifield Children’s Unit at Tone Vale Hospital in the West of England, this novel is a subjective but faithful representation of children`s psychiatric care in that period. As such, it aims to raise awareness of a hidden world of institutional injustice and abuse in the recent history of young persons` mental health care.