Harry is a man in his late 80’s. He is divorced and lives alone in his own home. He has a number of physical health problems associated with old age and is provided with a package of home care by the Older People’s Social Services Team. He likes cats and encourages strays to enter his home, feeding these visitors and encouraging them to take up residence in his living room, which is also ..read more

 (Here's the text, but it's worth watching the video for pictures of puffins)The Mental Health Act has been evolving over many decades. Indeed, the Victorian Lunacy Acts in the 1800’s contained recognisable germs of the current MHA. The Mental Treatment Act 1930 first introduced the idea of treatment for people with mental disorder, while the 1959 Act introduced the concept of the Mental ..read more

 Norman was a man in his early 50’s. He came from a fairly wealthy middle class family, was educated in a public school, obtained a degree in Chemistry and had a high profile job in a pharmaceutical company for some years before setting up his own consultancy company. He married and had one son. The couple divorced after 4 years. He was dissatisfied that custody of his son was given to his ..read more

 So, you’ve been detained under the MHA, and you want to get out of hospital. Based on my decades of first-hand experience here a few hints and tips that might make your stay a little shorter. 1. Appeal against your detention When you are detained under a section of the MHA, it is the duty of the AMHP who detained you, and of the hospital staff, to inform you of your rights to appeal ..read more

 Back in the1980’s, when I used to do out of hours on call duties, Christmas Day was generally considered a good shift to have – you got double pay for the bank holiday, and no-one ever called Social Services on Christmas Day – Boxing Day, yes, New Year’s Day, yes, but never Christmas Day. Unless someone had chosen that day to go mad. It was a snowy evening, very festive, when I got a call ..read more

 I was at the CMHT when I got a call from the Criminal Justice Liaison Nurse. He had been asked to see Stella, a 62 year old woman in the local Police Station, who was under arrest on suspicion of attempted murder.  “I’ve just seen her,” he said. “She gives long rambling answers to even the simplest questions. I asked her about her next of kin, and she said: ‘I usually I do everything ..read more

 During the 1980’s and ‘90’s, as well as my day job as a social worker, I also did shifts on the out of hours service. I was on duty one evening when I got a call from the police. They had detained a man under s.136 – this is when a police officer who finds someone in a public place who “appears to him to be suffering from mental disorder and to be in immediate need of care or control” can ..read more

 Certain forms of dementia, such as Lewy Body Dementia, can produce the most vivid and outlandish of hallucinations in older people. One man I had to assess was troubled because “there are 3,474,263 people in my room, and they won’t go away.” Another elderly man I assessed had pulled up his fitted carpet and piled all his furniture in the corner of the room. When I asked him why he had ..read more

Electroconvulsive Therapy was first introduced as a treatment for mental illness in 1938. Today, its main use is in severe treatment resistant depression, as well as in catatonia and the depressive phases of bipolar affective disorder.The most recent statistics for the UK indicate that over 1,800 patients received courses of ECT during the year 2021. The average number of treatments per course ..read more

For a guardianship application to be made, a person has to be suffering from a mental disorder, and it is necessary for the welfare of the person, or to protect other people. A guardianship order gives the guardian three powers: to require the person to reside at a specific place, to require the person to attend for medical treatment, occupation, education or training, and to require access to ..read more