THE long-awaited White Paper reforms to the Mental Health Act (1983) contain some important proposals that begin to address the long-standing issues such as discrimination in who gets sectioned and the role of relatives — but there are still some groups of patients who face particular challenges when sectioned who don’t feature in these measures at all.

One such group are those who have both a mental illness and physical disability or health condition who find themselves sectioned but who face the same problems time and time again. This can have devastating consequences for their health and make service users justifiably nervous when handing over their care needs to psychiatric staff so they can concentrate on getting well.

Of course, there can also be problems for patients on a physical health ward with their mental health needs not being met, but many service users say the main difficulties surface when on the psychiatric side, where they can suffer neglect due to the attitude and ability of staff and inaccessible wards.