Bishop of London says faith communities face prejudice when seeking mental health support

SOME faith communities are finding it very difficult to discuss mental health – a reluctance made worse by the “prejudice and discrimination they face when they seek help”, the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Sarah Mullally, told the House of Lords during the Second Reading. Mental Health Bill on Monday.

The Bill aims to reform the Mental Health Act 1983 by improving the care and treatment of people with serious mental illnesses detained under the Act. Opening the debate, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Baroness Merrin, acknowledged that the Act was outdated.

“Its operation is associated with racial disparities, inadequate care for people with learning disabilities and people with autism, and fails to give patients an adequate voice,” he said. Early intervention was crucial and the modernized Act would ensure that care was “appropriate, compassionate and effective”.

These provisions include strengthening and clarifying custody criteria and introducing a new requirement for clinicians to involve patients in decisions about their care.

Bishop Mullally, a former Chief Nursing Officer, spoke about the importance of placing inequities in minority communities within the context of broader health disparities.

“Small groups seek health care much later, when their symptoms worsen,” he said, and mental health did not appear accessible to all populations. Quoting the experience of the Royal College of Nursing, he said: “Many black men’s first interaction with the service during a crisis is through the police.”

Also speaking on behalf of the absent Bishop of Gloucester, the Rt Revd Rachel Treweek, E’s presiding bishop for prisons, Bishop Mullally praised the Government for bringing forward overdue provisions to end the use of prisons and police cells as venues. security.

“The Rt Revd Archbishop told me that last year more than 300 people with mental health crises were taken to a police station, not hospital. According to the latest report of the Chief Inspector of Prisons, the average expected time for the transfer of mentally ill patients from prisons to hospitals is 85 days, or almost three months.”

He also spoke about the impact of the shortage of mental health nurses and doctors on those detained under the Mental Health Act and on society. “The learning disability nursing workforce in the NHS has decreased by 44 per cent since records began in 2009,” he told the House of Representatives.

Lord Touhig, deputy chairman of the National Autistic Society, hoped the long-awaited reforms would “allow us to end once and for all the myth that autism is a mental health problem”. “Autism is clearly not a mental health problem, and our failure to address it has meant that autistic people have been wrongfully imprisoned and deprived of their human rights in horrific and degrading conditions for decades.”

Former Prime Minister Baroness May raised a central issue for her: “The fact that so many people who find themselves in a mental health crisis somehow feel that, at those crisis points, everything matters to them. to whom society does things, rather than the people who can and do be part of the decision-making. “They lost their human dignity in the process they went through.”

Lord Alderdice, Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: “The truth is that none of us are just one individual. We exist in the context of relationships. “If we cannot find ways to deal with these relationships, acting solely on the basis of individual autonomy and human rights can actually create problems in itself.”

The bill now goes to Committee Stage.