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Mental Health Bill [HL]

I understand the root of the concern, but let us touch briefly on the Soviet Union point. When those people were locked up in mental institutions—Solzhenitsyn was perhaps the classic example—most of the doctors knew that what was being done was wrong. The problem for them in most cases, as it was for the directors of the institutions concerned, is that irrespective of whether they agreed or not, if they did not do it they lost their job at best and ended up as an in-patient at worst. What stops this happening, as my noble friend just indicated, is not the definition in the Bill but two things—the rule of law, which did not exist in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany and, very importantly, mental health tribunals plus the regular review of cases. That is important because in the old bins, as they were called, and of which I have considerable knowledge from the past, the police would bring someone along who was behaving atrociously and, they thought—rightly or wrong—madly, throw them to the nurses who would often half-strip the person and bung him into a padded cell. Sometimes the person went free a few days later, but sometimes they stayed there for a very long time and became institutionalised. There were pluses and minuses to that, mainly an awful lot of minuses, so I was pleased when that system ended. What was missing then—never mind the Soviet Union—was the application of mental health tribunals which allow people to challenge the system. The issue is not really whether such a thing could happen, because any authoritarian Government could just lock people up if they chose to do so. However, the checks in place in a western democratic society that has the rule of law are the law itself and the pretty sophisticated mental health review tribunal approach which we have developed in recent years and which I welcome greatly. That is what prevents the system returning to what it was in the Soviet Union as well as to what was considered fairly normal here in the 1950s and earlier.