I think I quite like the Mental Health Act review – I never expected the UK to rip it up and adopt a fully UN-CRPD type legal framework and I think the review chair, Professor Sir Simon Wessely, was right…

Do you remember where you were on 23rd December 2016? Where you one of the other nine people with me, somewhere around 9pm at a house in Dudley, present at or dealing with a healthcare incident that had been reported…

This post was first published by the N8 Policing Research Partnership, subsequent to their event on policing and mental health, hosted by the University of Lancaster in November 2018. The profile of mental health issues as a thematic in policing…

For some while, it has been suggested that the police service need to define what they mean by an incident being ‘mental health related’. You know those claims you’ve heard may times about how X percent of police demand or…

We are hearing stories on social media at the moment, of patients who claim they were told to ‘call the police’ when they have contacted their community or crisis team for support as they recognise they are becoming unwell or…

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.…

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…

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…

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…