SOME faith communities find it very hard to discuss mental health — a reluctance made worse by the “biases and discrimination they meet when they seek help”, the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Sarah Mullally, told the House of Lords during 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 people with severe mental illnesses when detained under the Act. Opening the debate, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Health and Social Care, Baroness Merrin, acknowledged that the Act was outdated.
“Its operation is associated with racial disparities and poor care for people with a learning disability, and autistic people, and it fails to give patients an adequate voice,” she said. Early intervention was the key, and the modernised Act would ensure that care was “appropriate, compassionate, and effective”.
Its provisions include strengthening and clarifying detention criteria, and introducing a new 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 wider 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 first 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 is the C of E’s lead bishop on prisons, Bishop Mullally commended the Government for bringing forward long-overdue provisions to end the use of prisons and police cells as places of safety.
“The Rt Revd Prelate has told me that last year more than 300 people suffering mental-health crises were taken not to a hospital, but to a police station. According to the recent report from the Chief Inspector of Prisons, the average time to wait to transfer mentally ill patients from prisons to hospitals is 85 days — almost three months.”
She also spoke about the impact of the shortages of mental-health nurses and doctors on those detained under the Mental Health Act and in the community. “The learning-disability nursing workforce in 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 end once and for all the myth that autism is a mental-health condition. Autism is most definitely not a mental-health condition, and our failure to address this has meant decades 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 fact that so many people who have found themselves in mental health crisis felt that, somehow, at those points of crisis, they were people to whom things were done, to whom society did things, rather than people who were able to be part of and involved in that decision-making. They lost their human dignity in 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 simply an individual. We exist in the context of relationships. If we do not find ways of engaging with those relationships, simply operating on the basis of individual autonomy and human rights may actually create problems of its own.”
The Bill now goes to the Committee Stage.