Mental Health Bill [HL]

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 25th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in this debate. I declare an interest as a retired psychiatrist and a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

So much of what I will say comes from my experience of working as a consultant psychiatrist in Northern Ireland. This is particularly important because the legislation in Northern Ireland has always been different from the legislation on this side of the water. The 1950s’ legislation was referred to earlier. In Northern Ireland, the 1961 Act did not, for example, permit admission or detention on the basis of personality disorder. I will come to that in a minute because that foundational difference is of enormous importance.

I welcome this Bill, not because it is a perfect Bill and not even because the foundations of the Bill are particularly good, but because it is at least an improvement on the way things have been for some time. I welcome the four principles it identifies. There are choice and autonomy, a least restrictive approach, and therapeutic benefit—although, of course, this is a difficult one to assess in a short period, as the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, has pointed out. It can be difficult to work out whether particular approaches to treatment are going to work in the short term. Often we need time. The fourth principle is treating the person as an individual, although again this is not as straightforward as it might appear.

As Dr Lade Smith, the president of the royal college, has pointed out, there are ways in which a piece of legislation such as this can be introduced. Although with plenty of resources there would be a good outcome, if there are inadequate resources the situation can be made much worse. It is not just that not enough resources do not make the situation sufficiently better; that can actually make it worse. For example, if a decision is made not to admit the most seriously ill patients to hospital, which is a very good principle, the consequence is that the people in the wards are even more disturbed and much more difficult to handle. Keeping the same level of staff makes it impossible to manage them because that number is not sufficient to deal with an increasingly toxic and non-therapeutic environment.

Changing from the most direct family member to a nominated person is very good. I entirely support it, but it is not without its consequences. If, before admission, the person is living with the family, but they decide to choose someone outside the family, the family may not be prepared to accept them back again. The nominated person may not be in a position to accept them either.

The truth is that none of us is simply an individual. We exist in the context of relationships. If we do not find ways of engaging with those relationships, simply operating on the basis of individual autonomy and human rights may actually create problems of its own. I absolutely agree that we should not admit disturbed people to police cells or to prisons, but if we do not provide sufficient alternative resources then either they are admitted to psychiatric units and other people who should be in those units are unable to be admitted because there is no room, or they are not admitted at all and things become worse.

This is a complex issue; it is not at all simple. There are unintended consequences. A whole list of colleagues have pointed this out: the noble Baronesses, Lady Murphy, Lady Hollins, Lady Buscombe and Lady May of Maidenhead, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London. Almost anyone who has had direct engagement with the care of patients in these circumstances realises that there is a degree of complexity in dealing with them that a piece of legislation on its own will not resolve, especially if it is not legislation that requires the provision of resources—which, of course, this Bill does not. Doing something without resources can not only be unsuccessful; it can make the situation worse.

Are there better ways of dealing with this? Yes. The Northern Ireland legislation is much better. It is what was referred to earlier as fusion legislation. That is to say that it looks first at the question of whether a person has disturbance of mind and brain function and, secondly, at whether they understand the information relevant to decisions and appreciate the relevance of it. For example, a person who had delusional thinking would obviously not understand the relevance or appreciate it. It gets away from lots of the problems that this part of the country finds itself dealing with because of the separation of mental illness and mental capacity. Those two things were brought together in the Northern Ireland legislation. That was easier because, as I said earlier, personality disorder was never regarded as an appropriate basis for a formal admission in the first place.

As has been said by a number of colleagues, one of the difficulties that has to be dealt with when legislation is changed if that change is not fundamental—or, frankly, even if it is—is that the culture being operated in is one in which all the staff have been working for decades. Trying to change that is really difficult. One way of doing it is to take little steps. I regard separating out autism and learning disabilities as a positive step in the right direction. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, is not in her place but I agree—perhaps unusually—with what she said about the overmedicalisation of problems of living. It is true in universities, where there are huge problems now in dealing with students. It is true in all sorts of areas. Every time someone has problems of living it is called mental illness: “I’ve got mental health, doctor”. We wish they did have mental health; that is what they do not have. That is why they have a problem.

All sorts of problems of living are now thought of as disturbance and disorder. That, in my view, is a serious mistake. I have to say that psychiatrists have made their own contribution to developing things in that way, but we have to pull back and look at it again. That is one of a number of very good reasons pointed out by noble Lords for why taking autism and learning disability out of that kind of package, and seeing them in a different way, is an important step in the right direction but—I come back to this again—as long as there is appropriate provision of resources. Without that, things will not go well and we will have unintended consequences.

Those who have produced this legislation and those who will scrutinise it have done and will do it with the best will in the world. They want to make things better and they are doing their best, but a funny thing happens in science: you produce a theory, do some work with it and then discover that it does not quite cover an issue, so you put in a little caveat. Then it does not cover that issue, so you put in another little caveat, and more and more. The whole thing becomes more complex until suddenly, one day, somebody says, “Do you know what? This is not the right theory”, and then there is a shift in understanding to a whole new way of thinking about it.

That is where we are with problems of this kind. We really need to make a paradigm shift. Your Lordships would expect me to say it but, on this issue, the approach that was taken where I was working in Northern Ireland is useful to explore, just as bringing together health and social care was useful. There are other useful things, such as advance choice, but there are so many that we could not possibly deal with them all in one debate. That is why we will be discussing them for quite some time.