Mental Health - January 2010
Is something going on with public place detentions?
The Mental Health Act allows you to be arrested in a
public place, but only if you’re suffering from mental disorder.
David Hewitt wonders whether that important caveat has been
forgotten.
Where a person is in a public place and seems
to be suffering from mental disorder, a constable may arrest him
and take him to a place of safety. Once there, the person may
be held for up to 72 hours, while he is assessed for detention
under the Mental Health Act.
The relevant power is contained in section 136
of the Act and there have long been concerns that in some cases,
mentally disordered people are present in a public place only
because they have been enticed there by the police. Following
publication of latest statistics on the use of the Mental Health
Act, we now have to ask whether section 136 is being used against
people who aren’t even suffering from mental disorder.
Anyone arrested under the Act may be taken
either to a hospital or to a police station. The new statistics
concern only the first group of people (which is probably smaller
than the second), and they show that in the year to April 2009, the
section 136 power was used almost 8,500 times. That represents an
increase of 20 per cent on the year before, and of more than 300
per cent over the decade.
Perhaps there are more mentally disordered
people outside hospital, and perhaps more of them find their way
into public places. And yet the new statistics show that the number
of people detained under the Mental Health Act has gone up by two
per cent in a year and by six per cent over the decade.
The conversion rates are equally noteworthy,
for of the people held in hospital under section 136, almost
three-quarters were not detained once they had been assessed. That
figure is itself up a quarter on the previous year, and by 330 per
cent over the last ten years. Only 1,751 of these people were
subsequently detained under section 2 or 3, which means that anyone
taken to hospital as a place of safety is almost four times more
likely to be discharged than to be detained.
These statistics concern only a minority of
people arrested under section 136, yet they beg some obvious
questions: are constables genuinely getting it wrong? Are the signs
of mental disorder so hard to discern? Or is the Mental Health Act
arrest power being used on occasions to deal with people who are
merely troublesome in a social context, simply to get them off the
streets?
David
Hewitt, Partner
Weightmans
LLP
The latest MHA statistics are
discussed elsewhere in this newsletter