Mental Health Bill [HL]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Kennedy put her finger on the key issue: whether it is better to put something like this in the Bill or to rely on professional standards, codes of conduct and the underlying general law of the country. I tend to prefer the latter, although I acknowledge my noble friend Lady Kennedy’s point that other countries, for example New Zealand, put it in legislation without any great disadvantage. I understand the argument in both directions, and I would not lose an enormous amount of sleep if it were in the Bill, but there are some warnings about that, and they perhaps need to be spelt out. Admitting someone to a psychiatric hospital on the basis of, for example, their religious or political beliefs would be unlawful anyway, unless you could show an accompanying mental illness. The intervention of the right reverend Prelate was appropriate, because some people go around these days claiming to be the son of God and to have other such relationships with God. If we had applied the same principle 2,000 years ago, history, and one or two other books, might have been written slightly differently, so we always have to be aware of it. It would be difficult to compulsorily treat on the basis of politics, culture or religion in the way that is feared without breaking the law, unless you could show a clear mental illness. I intervened in the speech of the noble Earl, Lord Howe, because I am concerned about people with compulsive disorders who would fall under subsection (3)(c) of his amendment. The noble Earl and others may remember the case of the Jewish woman who had survived the Nazi death camps. This was a very long time ago, I have to concede—it was when I was still a probation officer—but it got a certain amount of publicity at the time, not surprisingly. Like a number of people who came out of that experience, she felt an inner guilt. She had attempted to resolve it in many ways, including psychotherapy and so on, but in her later life it seemed to totally overtake her and she began to shoplift compulsively—you could not describe it otherwise—and appeared in Hampstead court almost daily. The court leant over backwards not to send people to prison but, after many offences had been committed and every type of voluntary approach had been tried, it sent her to prison. If we box ourselves in too much with these regulations we will at times make it inevitable that prisons—as they did then and as they do now—take too many people who are in need of mental health treatment rather than custodial sentences. Another example involves alcohol addiction. I give it against the slight warning that I was chairman of the Alcohol Education Centre in the 1970s, which was based at the Maudsley Hospital, and what I say arises out of the work of some psychiatrists there. The argument used to me as chairman of that organisation was that alcoholism should be treated as a mental illness, which was quite a powerful argument at the time. I had my doubts about it but they persuaded me—this is where it goes full circle—largely on the basis that the evidence was growing that acute addiction, whether to alcohol or drugs or cigarettes for that matter, could be linked to activity in the brain which could ultimately be treated. It is an interesting concept. I have gone back to the position that I held originally, before the psychiatrists got to me, that you still have to rely on the person wanting to take the treatment, which is an important aspect. Again, there is a shady area in between. In one of my earlier speeches at Committee stage I talked about the old mental health hospitals, referred to as ““bins”” at the time. Although it was totally inappropriate to hold so many people there as we did, we were holding people who would now end up in prison—and, as we have heard, are held there inappropriately—or who are adrift in the streets and need a safe place. The Grass Arena, written by another ex-client of mine, John Healy, refers to the problems he had when he was in between prison and treatment centres, a very difficult period. On one occasion he was about to be discharged from a prison sentence at Pentonville on Christmas eve, having been already sentenced to three months for a drunk and disorderly offence. The Ley Clinic, in Oxford, was unable to take him before that and was not prepared to section him even though he at that stage was asking to be sectioned. We did not section him; we got the court to impose another prison sentence for an unpaid fine, which kept him in until the new year. That is not the best way of dealing with these problems. Ultimately, I rely more on professional judgments from all the professions involved—not only psychiatry, I stress. Part of the battle that troubles me is that there are too many psychiatrists speaking for psychiatry and not enough people speaking for the other professions involved. This is a grey area that will always be difficult, and opinion is moving on whether alcoholism is a treatable mental illness. I could live with at least three of the conditions in the amendment but I have to say to the noble Earl, Lord Howe, that there is a danger that people will engage in certain types of compulsive behaviour—shoplifting, for example—which, by definition, will inevitably be taken into account by professionals, and in my view should be, if it is going to result in them going to prison. That is an assessment you have to make. That is why I find it difficult to make an absolute judgment of the type being assumed by this amendment. We must not make the mistake of assuming that including lots of special principles and conditions in the Bill will necessarily solve the problem for people who need treatment. It often pushes them on to the street or into prison. We have swung from the position of the 1940s and 1950s, when we had far too many people in psychiatric hospitals, to having a large section of people who need to be cared for, perhaps not in permanent care. One of the reasons that John Healy wrote The Grass Arena was to explain his feelings and circumstances. One of his problems was going into hostels. As the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, knows, it is difficult to find a hostel for someone who has a reputation for smashing up hostel staff and hostels, where there is a relatively more flexible regime. Frankly, we are not offering that person any real help and prison is not the answer either. Let us try to be flexible. Yes, the law must be absolutely clear to avoid the extremes of treating people because they have some strong religious or political belief or whatever, although I think that would be illegal anyway, but we must be very careful. My noble friend Lady Kennedy may be right: we could treat people in the way that the New Zealanders do—possibly things work well there. However, there is another side to the argument. It is worth remembering some of these cases particularly where issues such as compulsion are involved. You need to think carefully before including items such as paragraph (c) in this amendment.