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Policing is Not The Problem Here
Policing is not the problem here: the extent to which we rely upon policing – that’s the problem. This doesn’t not mean the police have no role to play, that the police are perfect and that we should never rely…
Draft Mental Health Strategy
This is an opportunity to comment upon a draft strategy for policing and mental health, which is being put together by Chief Constable Mark Collins, the National Police Chiefs Council lead on mental health. Please feel free to distribute this…
Beds and Stuff
It was being asked again last night, in the AMHP social media world as to whether Britain had run out of inpatient psychiatric beds. Obviously a difficult night to go out AMHPing, at least in some parts of the country.…
The 136 in Custody Thing
I said about eighteen months ago, that once the Mental Health Act was amended to unambiguously allow the use of s136 of the Act in any place that was not someone’s home, we’d see police officers considering its application in…
135/6: Authorising Officers
Short post mainly for those ranking officers who have statutory roles to play under the revised Mental Health Act 1983 (MHA) provisions which focus on those rare occasions where custody is still used as a Place of Safety under the…
Making the Same Mistakes
I woke up this morning to a tag on Twitter from Australia drawing my attention to questions being asked following an encounter between Victoria Police in Melbourne and a mentally vulnerable man referred to as ‘John’. Police officers had been…
Keep Your Eye on the Ball
You’ll remember I’ve been banging on for a number of years now about the problem of people being in police custody for many hours or even for many days, waiting for Mental Health Act assessment, or more usually waiting for…
Much Less Blogging
You guys seemed to use the BLOG a lot last year, way more than any other single year since I started in 2011 and that was really encouraging on one level. However, I couldn’t help but notice the vast majority…
The Same But Different
Norman Lamb MP wrote to his local police force recently, asking about those kinds of cases I’ve been banging on for years now: people being held in custody for hours and hours, if not days and days, following their arrest…
Journalist looking for recent cases of dangerous/abusive therapy
We have been approached by a journalist who would like to find people willing to speak out about their recent experience of abuse by a therapist for a potential documentary or news item on dangerous therapy. Contributors can remain anonymous. Please…
Police Leadership
I heard the Health Secretary Jeremy HUNT deliver a speech at today’s Crisis Care Concordat Summit in London, the first major speech he’s delivered on mental health, we were told. Almost the first thing he did was praise the police…
AWOL from Scotland
It seems that it’s been the week for Scottish mental health patients to journey to England, in a variety of legal situations that have subsequently confused the life out of police and mental health professionals alike. So we had the…
Conflating Beds
We hear this word ‘Beds’ a lot when we hear discussion of mental health services and it can get very confusing because the word is used to mean different things, not all of them literal. It happened earlier today during…
What a year of unemployment has done to my mental health
It has been almost a year now since I found myself unemployed and unable to work due to illness. A lot has happened in that time, my world has been turned on it’s head and I have been left feeling…
Exeter church apparently ignoring safeguarding concerns about struck-off counsellors
In May 2016 we published the Unsafe Spaces report, which highlighted how under-regulation of counselling and psychotherapy allows people to practice in these fields even after being struck off for very serious misconduct. In July the report was discussed in…