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Mental Health Bill [HL]

My Lords, I just add a brief word about the contrary pull of compulsion and therapy. Obviously, I am not a medical practitioner, but I often have to deal with people who need to, if I may put it this way, do some work on themselves if they are to flourish and make a continued good contribution. I have never known a case where compulsion assisted in that process. It is always to be undertaken with the greatest reluctance because of its counter-therapeutic effect. The patient—the person—is deflected from an engagement with the forces within that have to be engaged with into a preoccupation with the forces of the authority that has required the patient to have treatment. As I say, that is counter-therapeutic; therefore, the narrowing of the criteria—imposing statutory reluctance, as it were—seems to be of the first importance.