Clause 1
Mental Health Bill [Lords]
11:00 am
Rosie Winterton (Minister of State (Health Services), Department of Health; Doncaster Central, Labour)
I certainly will do. As I was saying, the definitions do not relate directly to clinical diagnoses. What counts legally as psychopathic disorder goes well beyond what the person in the street would probably mean by a psychopath, for example. Clinically, in many ways the legal definitions are a distraction. A clinician does not need to know which of those categories a patient’s disorder falls into in order to decide on treatment. The current law forces the clinician to spend time thinking about the categories. Importantly, they can also be a legal distraction. Time can be taken up by tribunals, especially when dealing with restricted offender patients, who might be trying to gain some advantage by arguing about classification when it has nothing to do with the risk posed bytheir disorder or the treatment needed to tackle it. Obviously, we believe that compulsion should be determined by a patient’s needs and the degree of risk posed by their disorder, not by the particular legal label applied.
The four categories in the 1983 Act create arbitrary and unnecessary distinctions between patients. Also, coming to the points raised by the hon. Member for Southport and the hon. Member for Daventry, the categories may leave some patients out entirely from certain parts of the Act. In other words, patients could be detained for assessment but not then detained further for the treatment that they need. I should emphasise that we are talking about a very small number of people here. There have been some misconceptions that somehow, by changing the categories, we are widening the number of people who might come under the detention provisions. That is not the case. A very limited number of people are not covered by the current “disorders”; they almost certainly include certain mental disorders arising from brain injuries acquired in adulthood. That may be the difficulty to which the hon. Member for Southport referred.