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Mental Health Bill [HL]

I support AmendmentNo. 31. I believe that its merits are self-evident—the Minister should not require my intervention to see them. However, we have heard much in the course of our debates about the stigmatising effect of being made subject to the powers of the Mental Health Act. Here is an opportunity to include a small measure that could ease the stigma of the Act. The Mental Health Act Commission drew attention to the stigmatising language of Section 135 of the 1983 Act in its last biennial report to Parliament. The amendment seeks to render into modern language the current formulation of the criteria for a warrant, which at the moment contains the unnecessarily offensive notions of ““mentally disordered persons”” and, "““kept otherwise than under proper control””." If the Minister is minded to reject the amendment, I ask him what is ““proper control”” of a person suffering from a mental disorder, and who is entitled to exercise it? It seems to me that the notion of proper control is both outdated and inexact and should be replaced. As my noble friend Lady Murphy, an eminent historian of the history of psychiatry, knows better than I, and as the noble Earl, Lord Howe, has stated, the origins of many of the 1983 Act’s provisionscan be traced back to the Lunacy Acts of the19th century, if not to older measures. The phrase ““proper care and control”” can be found in Section 13(3) of the Lunacy Act 1890. There is nothing necessarily wrong with the continuance of key powers in this way. After all, mental health legislation always serves the same basic purpose of determining rules about coercive interventions. However, it means that we have to be careful that we are not unwittingly perpetuating19th century attitudes towards mental disorder. Many changes have been made to the wording of provisions as they have been translated from one Act to its successor over the past century. For example, we no longer have, "““alleged lunatics wandering at large””," as the 1890 Act would have them. That is a good example of a piece of Victoriana that now needs to be put aside.