SOME faith communities find it very hard to debate mental health — a reluctance made worse by the “biases and discrimination they meet once they seek help”, the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Sarah Mullally, told the House of Lords throughout the Second Reading of the Mental Health Bill, on Monday.
The Bill seeks to reform the Mental Health Act 1983, by improving the care and treatment of individuals with severe mental illnesses when detained under the Act. Opening the controversy, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State on the Department of Health and Social Care, Baroness Merrin, acknowledged that the Act was outdated.
“Its operation is related to racial disparities and poor look after individuals with a learning disability, and autistic people, and it fails to provide patients an adequate voice,” she said. Early intervention was the important thing, and the modernised Act would be certain that care was “appropriate, compassionate, and effective”.
Its provisions include strengthening and clarifying detention criteria, and introducing a recent requirement that clinicians involve patients in decisions about their care.
Bishop Mullally, a former Chief Nursing Officer, spoke of the importance of putting the inequalities of minoritised communities in the broader context of health inequalities.
“Small groups present to health services far later, when their symptoms have worsened,” she said, and mental health was not seen as accessible to all communities. Quoting the Royal College of Nursing’s stated experience, she said: “Many black men have a primary interaction with the service via the police during a crisis.”
On behalf also of the absent Bishop of Gloucester, the Rt Revd Rachel Treweek, who’s the C of E’s lead bishop on prisons, Bishop Mullally commended the Government for bringing forward long-overdue provisions to finish using prisons and police cells as places of safety.
“The Rt Revd Prelate has told me that last 12 months greater than 300 people suffering mental-health crises were taken to not a hospital, but to a police station. According to the recent report from the Chief Inspector of Prisons, the typical time to attend to transfer mentally unwell patients from prisons to hospitals is 85 days — almost three months.”
She also spoke in regards to the impact of the shortages of mental-health nurses and doctors on those detained under the Mental Health Act and locally. “The learning-disability nursing workforce within the NHS has dropped by 44 per cent since records began in 2009,” she told the House.
The vice-president of the National Autistic Society, Lord Touhig, hoped that the long-awaited reforms would “allow us to finish once and for all the parable that autism is a mental-health condition. Autism is most definitely not a mental-health condition, and our failure to deal with this has meant a long time when autistic people have been wrongly incarcerated, in appalling and degrading conditions, and robbed of their human rights.”
The former Prime Minister Baroness May raised what was, for her, a fundamental issue: “The indisputable fact that so many individuals who’ve found themselves in mental health crisis felt that, one way or the other, at those points of crisis, they were people to whom things were done, to whom society did things, reasonably than individuals who were in a position to be a part of and involved in that decision-making. They lost their human dignity within the processes that they went through.”
Lord Alderdice, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: “The truth is that none of us is solely a person. We exist within the context of relationships. If we don’t find ways of engaging with those relationships, simply operating on the idea of individual autonomy and human rights may very well create problems of its own.”
The Bill now goes to the Committee Stage.
