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Mental Health Bill [Lords]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady because she has enticed me into my next paragraph. I know that many clinicians say that it is standard clinical practice to differentiate symptoms and signs. Using that term in the Bill therefore appears nice and clear. A symptom is something that patients can articulate or feel to be part of the condition. A sign is what the clinician can objectively perceive. Those definitions are generally accepted, although some clinicians use ““sign”” differently, to mean either what a clinician can perceive through understanding of the clinical condition or what any person could perceive. That introduces an element of ambiguity. More significantly, the word ““sign”” may have a clinical meaning but it has no clear legal meaning and consequently confuses the issue. The word ““manifestation””, which has no clinical meaning, provides much greater clarity in the Bill because there must be a direct relationship between the manifestation and the condition. On that basis, I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister will share my understanding of ““manifestation”” and make that clear. All the organisations that have written to me and to her, asked for meetings with her and lobbied her as ferociously as me—our last meeting was this afternoon; I hope that we never have to discuss the Bill again after today, much as I like her—support that. I hope that she can put on record her precise understanding of ““manifestation”” and that she will say that the Government are prepared—perhaps uniquely—to accept an amendment from a Government Back Bencher. I end by saying that we cannot always prevent suicide. I know from my own family and my constituents that there are cases in which it feels like suicide is likely to be the almost inevitable outcome of someone’s mental disorder. However, we should not wash our hands of people in that situation. Neither should we encourage the culture of blame, which all too often attends mental health services when somebody takes either their own or somebody else’s life. All too often when that happens, the newspapers will demand, ““Let’s find the psychiatrist who let this person out.”” We cannot completely eliminate risk and we have to be cautious about both detaining and releasing people. Furthermore, we should not give up seeking treatment for those who have personality disorders just because we have believed that the treatment was not very effective in the past. A compromise is available here—a compromise between the extremely high hurdle that the Lords insisted on, which made no reference to symptoms or manifestations of the condition and stressed the likelihood of the treatment having a particular effect, and the version that the Government originally wanted. It is undoubtedly a compromise, but when the Minister rises to her feet, I hope that she will not just accept the amendment grudgingly. I hope that she will not feel that she is simply backing down. I hope, rather, that she will ardently embrace the amendment, because it will leave her with a better Bill.