Campaign against UK mental health laws
I have been considering setting up a campaigns section on Anxiety 2 Calm to highlight some of the problems people with mood disorders face from society, the medical establishment, the complimentary/alternative establishment and the law.
I have just read an article in the UK’s Independent newspaper which has made me extremely worried. I will link to the article below, but just to sum up, a woman was “sectioned” under the mental health act after going to her doctor to discuss feeling depressed at being unable to conceive a child. (In the UK, to be sectioned is to be arrested and held in a secure mental institution or police station).
This highlights a worrying trend. I don’t want to get too political in this blog, because it is meant for people from all over the world who have anxiety depression disorders, regardless of what they believe in. That said, I think all of us with any decency will want to criticize the new Mental Health Act recently offered up by Tony Blair’s UK government. The act gives police and doctors sweeping powers to detain people who have broken no law on the basis that at some time in the future they might pose a risk to themselves or others.
Now, no one is arguing that if someone is suicidal they may need to be detained, likewise if they are brandishing a weapon or using verbal threats. But this law goes much further, allowing doctors effectively to use gut instinct to decide who to detain and for how long. The law change was proposed after many incidents of violent schizophrenics, at large in the community, killing and attacking people.
So, instead of a system where those with violent personality disorders are looked after, treated, and helped where possible to lead normal lives, we are left with a situation in which any one with any “mental health issue”, including the kind of depression or anxiety that a majority of us will feel at sometime in our lives, are targets for a failed system. Most of us know that doctors, although academically bright, sometimes lack basic common sense. They can not be trusted to have this kind of power with such little oversight.
So let’s campaign for a law which guarantees the human rights of patients in terms of determining their treatment and care, and only allows for detention when there is specific reason to believe that serious self-harm or violence is imminent. And let’s make sure that there is sufficient advocacy on hand tom ensure that those people who are detained are treated fairly, and humanely.
