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Inside the Mental Health Bill
PROFESSOR ANSELM ELDERGILL explains why this new piece of government legislation is giving cause for concern
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THE government’s Mental Health Bill is currently before Parliament. It amends the Mental Health Act 1983, which is the Act of Parliament under which people are “sectioned.”
The Bill is the culmination of a process which the then prime minister Theresa May begun in 2017 when she commissioned an independent review of the 1983 Act by a panel under Professor Simon Wessely. I chaired the Patient Safeguards and Mental Health Tribunals Working Group which formed part of that review.
The Bill is disappointingly limited in scope and ambition. The current system is 66 years old, as old as the Lunacy Act 1890 was when it was replaced by the present framework in the 1950s. We needed a new Act. Eight years on, we have an amending Bill that preserves the framework and much of the old legislation.
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