Wednesday 6 November 2024
Tom Purser, CEO of the Autism Centre of Excellence at Cambridge (ACE), said:
Today’s news of the long-overdue reforms to the Mental Health Act is important and should be welcomed. However, there are aspects of the reforms over which we still have deep concerns. We hope that many of these will be addressed in the implementation of the reforms, but we think it is important that alongside welcoming changes to the legislation, we hold Government to account for their delivery.
The Government has said that:
For those with a learning disability or autistic people, the Act will be amended to place a limit of 28 days for which they can be detained unless they have a co-occuring mental health condition.
Autism is not a mental health condition but given that 8 in every 10 autistic people experience mental health issues, without the right safeguards we are concerned that the new provisions could simply lead to a perpetuation of the current intolerable situation.
The announcement also says:
Police and prison cells will also no longer be used to place people experiencing a mental health crisis…Instead, patients will be supported to access a suitable healthcare facility that will better support their needs.
Whilst on the face of it such facilities might seem more preferable to a police cell, there is serious and significant evidence that these facilities remain a risk to the welfare, health and even the lives of autistic people. The Lampard Inquiry has been set up precisely to look at over 2,000 deaths of people in inpatient mental health facilities specifically in Essex – it is believed that many of those who died were autistic. It would be wrong to assume that simply switching the location that autistic people are detained is going to achieve much in the way of better protecting them.
The Government has also said the reforms will:
Introduce statutory care and treatment plans.
We believe that every autistic person who needs support should have access to a statutory plan to enable them to get the help they need. It should not take an autistic person falling into crisis and being detained in the mental health system for such support to be provided.
Lastly, it should be recognised that the current system does in fact have a range of provisions, legal rights and safeguards which should, in theory, have reduced the number of people detained in inpatient mental health services. Government statistics show they have not. We believe this is because there is a critical gap between what happens at a policy and legislative level, and what is actually happening on the ground. Without reckoning with this gap and setting up measures to ensure that what is said by Government turns into real action on the ground these reforms will end up failing to change the now decades-long scandal of thousands of autistic people being detained in inpatient services.