Psychiatric patients 'feel lost and unsafe'Almost 10 years ago, the NHS was warned by the then Health Secretary, Alan Milburn, that it was in the 'last chance saloon'. Unless the health system agreed to sweeping reforms, he said, it would die. At the heart of his vision, he announced, was a complete overhaul of mental health legislation.

It was to be, he said, the biggest NHS reform in 40 years and would bring about a 'safe, sound, supportive mental health system' whose emphasis lay in community, rather than hospital care. It was to be a system in which prevention and crisis resolution were watchwords and one that, crucially, had the welfare of patients at its heart.

These transformations were to be achieved through the Mental Health bill, a draft paper which campaigners were horrified to discover also contained new powers to compel patients discharged from hospital to continue taking their treatment, and to lock up people with severe personality disorders judged to be a danger to themselves or others. So alarmed were doctors and campaigners by the powers the bill proposed that they revolted.

It took the government five years to drag the bill through its parliamentary passage, a journey only finally completed last July. A year after its implementation, however, and despite the extra £1 billion of government funding that accompanied its introduction, the incoming president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists has admitted there is nothing in the bill to halt the degradation of in-patient mental health care in Britain.

Acute psychiatric wards are now so poor, he has admitted in an exclusive interview on the eve of his appointment, that he would not use them himself - nor allow a member of his family to do so.

To read the rest of this article go to the Observer, 29 June 2008

Psychiatric patients 'feel lost and unsafe' - Comment from Amelia Hill, social affairs correspondent