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Mental Health Bill [HL]

The background to these amendments has already been stated, but I briefly want to look at their importance from the other end of the telescope. It takes me back to the days when I was a GP. I am remembering two patients; one came in and told me that he wanted to kill somebody now, and that he had a knife in his pocket and an axe in his bag. With persuasion, he handed me the knife to lock up and then agreed to go and see a friend of mine, who was a psychiatrist. The other was a young man who came in because he was frightened by his tendency to be enormously attracted to the choir boys at his church. The ability to come in and seek help early is terribly important in making sure that people who might progress to harm others do not do so. We have to give society a powerful message, not that the Bill is about locking up people who may be seen to be deviant in any sense, but that it is a mental health Bill for people who have mental health issues. Social control is another parameter in society, but we should not use psychiatry as the lever for social control, particularly not when psychiatry is dramatically under-resourced. I am worried that if the message of the Bill is that if someone expresses any of those tendencies he is more likely than previously to be locked up, then those tendencies will not be expressed to a clinician or somebody who can help, they will be expressed by being acted out and somebody will be sexually harmed or killed.