Mental health hospitals breaching human rights

The Joint Committee on Human Rights has claimed that the human rights of many people with a learning disability and/or autism are being breached in mental health hospitals.

By law, young people with learning disabilities or autism detained in mental health hospitals must have treatment that is necessary, appropriate and available. However, an inquiry, launched in January, heard evidence of ‘a significant increase in distress and a worsening of symptoms for those detained, particularly where segregation and restraint have been used’.

The committee is urging for an overhaul of inspections and changes to the Mental Health Act to protect those detained from the ‘horrific reality’ of conditions and treatment under which many young people with learning disabilities and autism are detained in mental health hospitals, which is being deemed as ‘inflicting terrible suffering on those detained and causing anguish to their distraught families’.

The damning report says that it has ‘lost confidence that the system is doing what it says it is doing and the regulator's method of checking is not working’. In relation to the Care Quality Commission, the committee of MPs finds that ‘a regulator which gets it wrong is worse than no regulator at all’.

The committee states it has no confidence that the government’s target to reduce the numbers of people with learning disabilities and/ or autism in mental health. With the biggest barrier to progress seen as a lack of political focus and accountability to drive change, MPs stress that a Number 10 unit with cabinet level leadership is required to urgently drive forward reform.

Furthermore, the committee demands an overhaul of inspections, to include covert surveillance and unannounced visits at night and weekends, that only individuals who will benefit from treatment are detained in mental hospital, and that families are fully involved in decisions.

Harriet Harman, chair of the committee, said “This inquiry has shown with stark clarity the urgent change that is needed and we’ve set out simple proposals for exactly that. They must now be driven forward, urgently. It has been left to the media and desperate, anguished parents to expose the brutal reality of our system of detention of people with learning disabilities or autism. We must not look away. The horrific reality is of whole lives needlessly blighted, and families in despair. What we saw does not fit our society’s image of itself as one which cares for the vulnerable and respects everyone’s human rights. It must not be allowed to continue.”