Our Values, Our Objectives
Our values
We believe that everyone is born with certain inalieanable rights, known as human rights. These human rights cannot be withdrawn from anyone, by anyone.
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However, in the West, the State has decided to withdraw these fundamental rights from people suffering from mental health problems. Once a medical professional, usually a psychiatrist decides that someone suffers from a mental health problem or lacks capacity, that person loses their findamental rights. They lose their right of autonomy, their right to freedom, their right to privacy and to a family life. They may be forcibly given medical treatment which is of no therapeutic benefit. These acts breach the European Convention on Human Rights 1998, which is supposed to be integrated into UK legislation. And yet, these acts are permitted by the Mental Health Act 1983, last reformed in 2007.
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We believe that people with mental ill-health possess human rights just as much as anyone else. We believe that modern medicine has departed from its traditional maxim of 'Do no harm' and needs to be reformed.
We believe that our values are consistent with all major political persuasions although our own movement is largely apolitical. Except that we reserve the right to campaign against political policies that result in gross inequality such as the Tory austerity programme.
Our objectives
Our primary objective is to enhance the status of people with mental health conditions.
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To achieve this objective, we campaign for the following causes:
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Make all UK legislation fully compliant with the European Convention on Human Rights 1998
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Reform then abolish the Mental Health Act (MHA)
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So far as possible, eliminate all forms of coercion from mental healthcare
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Stop clinical drug trials which do not conform to the provisions of the Helskinki Declaration
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Human Rights for All
In 1948, the United Nations published the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a response to the horrors of the second world war. According to the Declaration, all people are born with certain universal, inalienable and indivisible fundamental rights which cannot be taken away by anyone else. The UK was a signatory of the Declaration and since 1998 those rights have been embedded in UK Law according to the Human Rights Act 1998 which was supposed to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights 1998.
Human rights recognized by the European Convention include the right to freedom unless for good cause, the right to a fair trial, the right to have a family life, the right to be treated with dignity, the right to think what we want. Certain actions are banned under the Convention including arbitrary detention, torture and humiliating or degrading treatment. It is only legal to detain someone if they have access to justice and if a mechanism exists to protest the detention. Under certain circumstances, it may be legal to give medical treatment to someone against their will, for example when they are deemed to lack capacity, but only if the treatment is of therapeutic benefit.
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Although the UK is currently a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights 1998 and has formally integrated the principles into UK legislation, the Convention is in contradiction with certain national legislation such as the Mental Health Act 1983 even after it was reformed in 2007. Successive Conservative governments under Cameron and May have also indicated an intention to abolish the Human Rights Act and several Charities such as Amnesty International and Liberty are campaigning to retain a rights-based legal framework.
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"Too often, patients treated in hospital - both formally and informally - fail to follow their treatment plans on discharge and need to be re-admitted to hospital because their condition deteriorates following loss of contact with care services. It is totally unacceptable that a group of patients who are known to pose a risk either to themselves or to others when they fail to comply with treatment, should so easily drop out of care in this way - sometimes with tragic results"
— Milburn & Michael, 1999 Green Paper
Mental Health Legislation
Mental health legislation in the UK has evolved during the last century according to a series of reforms which have aimed to balance the rights of ordinary members of the public and the rights of people with mental health conditions.
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The Mental Health Act 1959 was the first in the modern era and aimed to remove the distinction between psychiatric institutions and hospitals. It reframed mental disorders in medical terms and for the first time gave a legal definition of a mental disorder which included mental illness, arrested development of the mind, psychopathic disorder and other disorders or disabilities of the mind. At the time, 0.4% of the population lived in asylums and there was an objective to treat more of these people in the community on a voluntary basis. A legal framework was also created for the forced detention of mentally disordered people in hospital when this was necessary under the orders of a doctor, although it did not make provision for the forced treatment of people in hospitals.
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The Mental Health Act 1983 enacted a major reform of mental health legislation motivated by the desire to protect the rights of patients. A number of controversial and aggressive medical treatments had been developed including psychosurgery, electro-convulsive therapy and powerful anti-psychotic treatment and the new legislation was intended to protect patients against forced treatment against their consent, except in exceptional cases where a doctor decided this was in the patients' best interest and when the patient was judged to lack capacity. In 2007, the Mental Health Act was amended to include provisions for Community Treatment Orders to permit the forcible administration of medication to patients treated at home.
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Under the provisions of the MHA 1983, the decision to apply a Section permitting forced treatment must be agreed by three separate professionals, including a psychiatrist. In emergency situations, a temporary Section lasting 48 hours is applied and may be extended for a maximum of 30 days. The Section may be extended for a longer period of up to 2 years but only after this has been agreed at a special tribunal. The patient may appeal against the Section at the Tribunal and also has the right to apply for the Tribunal hearing to take place at an earlier date.
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A more extensive reform of the mental health act had been envisaged in the late 1990s when the Blair government commissioned a review headed by the academic Genevra Richardson. The Expert Committee made extensive recommendations which would have brought the Act in line with the European Convention on Human Rights, placed greater emphasis on patient advocacy and imposed greater constraints on the medical treatment allowed under the Act (it has to have therapeutic value). Unfortunately, the Health Secretary Alan Milburn blocked many of the more progressive and liberal changes and the current legislation remains in contradiction with human rights law.
Abuse in UK Mental Healthcare
Coercion
The UK mental health system is highly coercive and any dissent is brutally suppressed. It is a common practice for patients to be physically assaulted by four nurses, pushed to the floor face down and to have powerful sedative medication adminstered in the buttocks.
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Forced medical treatment
The number of forced detentions under the Mental Health Act has been increasing during the last 20 years. In 2017, there were 45,864 compulsory detentions in the UK compared to 23,100 in 2,000. Medication is frequently adminstered which sometimes has no therapeutic value. Doses of anti-psychotic medication are often chosen to make difficult patients compliant.
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Physical and sexual assault
There are regular reports of unprovoked physical attacks by staff in NHS mental health facilities. Sexual harassment is commonplace and mental health nurses have been convicted of multiple sexual assaults. When we examined the records of Fitness-to-practice tribunal hearings conducted by the Nursing and Midwifery Council, we found that there was a lower threshold for penalising nurses working in physical healthcare than for nurses working in mental healthcare.
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Humiliating and degrading treatment
A series of BBC Panorama programmes have documented the degrading treatment of people with learning disabilities and mental health problems in several different facilties in the UK, including Winterbourne View in 2012 and Whorlton Hall in May 2019. Vulnerable people are subjected to abuse in both private and NHS mental health facilities.
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Abusive conditions seem to be concentrated in several mental health facilities. We are collecting information on abusive centres so as to put together a map showing the geographic distribution of abuse in the UK. This information will be shared in due course with regulatory authorities. In the mean time, we would be interested in hearing anonymously from people with experience of abuse in the UK.
"The ascent of the privileged, not only in the Lager but in all human coexistence, is an anguishing but unfailing phenomenon: only in utopias is it absent. It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end. Where power is exercised by few or only one against the many, privilege is born and proliferates, even against the will of the power itself."
—Primo Levi, If this is a man
Reform of the Mental Health Act 1983
Against a backdrop of rising numbers of detentions under the Mental Health Act - the number of detentions per year doubled over the previous decade to a high of over 44,000 - the May government decided to conduct a review of mental health legislation.
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In September 2018, a commission led by the psychiatrist Sir Simon Wessely published their recommendations for reforming the Mental Health Act.
Wessely, a previous President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists with a particular interest in malingering, has produced a report which argues for minimal change and would leave mental health legislation in contradiction with modern human rights law. The Wessely Commission also fails to reflect the experience and views of those most affected by the legislation.
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In the UK, there exists a vocal survivor movement formed by people who have been harmed by psychiatric treatment. Many of us have been sectioned under the Mental Health Act of 1983 and it is unacceptable that our experience is being ignored in the process of legal reform.
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This injustice has motivated us to publish our own manifesto for reform of the Mental Health Act 1983. We propose a Mental Health Reform Act which promotes good mental healthcare and which protects the human rights of people with mental disorders. We will be seeking to influence the future Mental Health Act Reform Bill when this passes through Parliament later this year.
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If you are affected by the issues discussed on this website and are concerned about the reform of the Mental Health Act 1983, we would be interested in hearing from you. You can get in touch via the Contact page.
And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork, cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were many who did not guess at its presence and many, many others who had heard something vague [...] And in this same way our whole country was infected by the poisons of the Archipelago. And whether it will ever be able to get rid of them someday, only God knows.
—Aleksandr Soltzhenitskyn, The Gulag Archipelago