You may well have missed it under the Brexit deluge but Theresa May announced a major reform of the Mental Health Act this month – the first for 30 years.
She had commissioned Sir Simon Wessely, Regius Professor of Psychiatry at King’s College London and president of the Royal Society of Medicine to examine the legal state of Britain’s mental health system.
His report came out earlier this month. Frankly it is full of warm words but proposes scant action and dumps the problem of better treatment for mental health patients on the NHS.
The good part of his report is that it does give better rights for patients held under community treatment orders. and some useful changes when mental patients die in police custody including restoring non means tested legal aid to challenge the authorities.
The bad part of his report is that it fails to offer a solution to what is one of the most glaring problems in the mental health service – the vast number of Afro-Caribbeans who are sectioned compared to the majority white population.
It acknowledges it exists and in his introduction Sir Simon Wessely quotes the view of one ethnic minority person who told him “for a black person, a psychiatric hospital is seen as the place where they drug you up, and at worst even kill you”.
He goes on to confirm that nothing much has changed in 30 years.
“it is sad to record that little has changed. There does appear to be more consensus that this increase is real, and not an artefact, and also that it is related to experiences of discrimination, exclusion and racism. There is also consensus that even taking this into account, the use of coercion is far greater in this population, finding its most painful expression in the statistic that those of black African or Caribbean heritage are over eight times more likely to be subjected to Community Treatment Orders than those of white heritage. In other words, too often and in too many areas the experiences of those of black African and Caribbean heritage is one of either being excluded or detained.”
He then admits institutional racism exists even if it is unconscious but the main body of the 307 page report does not address the issue of why psychiatrists accept that Afro-Caribbeans are eight times more likely to be schizophrenic or suffer from psychosis than anyone else. Nor does it propose any remedies for this particular problem. You can read the report via this link.
Read the full blog post HERE