Mentally ill face compulsory treatment orders
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People with mental health problems could be put under strict supervision orders once they are discharged from hospital, under legislation published on Friday.
Health Minister Rosie Winterton said the controls included in the Mental Health Bill would “improve the safety of both patients and the public.”
The bill, which covers England and Wales, was published a day after a damning report into how a paranoid schizophrenic killed a cyclist in a random knife attack after he was allowed to leave a secure hospital unit.
The report found that a “cumulative failure” of those caring for John Barrett led to his killing complete stranger Denis Finnegan in Richmond Park, southwest London, in September 2004.
Under the new proposals, doctors will be able to order patients detained in hospital with mental health problems to be subject to so-called supervised community treatment when they are discharged.
This will require them to return to hospital if doctors think they need further treatment.
At present authorities have to apply for a discharged patient to be compulsorily sectioned again if they want them back in hospital.
The government says that for many patients supervised community treatment will be preferable to continuing detention in hospital.
At any one time there are around 14,000 people with mental health problems so serious they have to be detained in hospital.
“This bill will help ensure that people with serious mental health problems receive the treatment they need to protect them and others from harm,” Winterton said.
“It will also strengthen patient safeguards and ensure human rights are protected.”
But mental health campaigners fear the supervision provisions will become a kind of “mental health anti-social behaviour order”, imposing restrictions on the freedom of patients, which will do nothing to improve their mental health.
“They want to tell people when they might have to get home at night, where they can live, where they can’t go,” Jane Harris of charity Rethink told BBC television.
“If you’ve got a mental illness, you want care and treatment. You don’t want a piece of paper telling you what you should be doing.”
A spokesman for the Mental Health Alliance told Reuters it wanted the wording of the bill amended to restrict the powers available under supervised treatment orders.
“It is very possible, with the kind of defensive atmosphere in which mental health services are forced to work, that people could be kept on these for longer than is absolutely necessary, in the way the law is proposed to be written.
“You can’t leave something like this too loose—it’s about depriving someone of their liberty.”
The bill is an amended version of government proposals scrapped in March after vigorous campaigning from mental health groups.
It is likely to face further opposition as it passes through parliamentary scrutiny.
Conservative health spokesman Tim Loughton said the bill was an attack on civil liberties.
“This bill is designed to do the work of the Home Office instead of protecting people in severe mental distress,” he said.
The Mental Health Alliance, which brings together 78 organisations, plans to lobby parliament later this month.
Revision date: July 9, 2011
Last revised: by Janet A. Staessen, MD, PhD
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