SOME faith communities find it very difficult to discuss mental health – a reluctance compounded by the “prejudice and discrimination they face when seeking help”, the Bishop of London, the Right Reverend Sarah Mullally, has said , in the House of Lords during the second reading. of the Mental Health Bill on Monday.

The Bill aims to reform the Mental Health Act 1983, improving the care and treatment of people with serious mental illnesses when they are detained under the Act. Opening the debate, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Health and Social Care, Baroness Merrin, admitted the law was outdated.

“Its operation is associated with racial disparities and poor care for people with learning disabilities and people with autism, and it fails to give patients an adequate voice,” she said. Early intervention was key, and the modernized law would ensure care was “appropriate, compassionate and effective”.

Its provisions include strengthening and clarifying detention criteria and introducing a new requirement that clinicians involve patients in decisions about their care.

Bishop Mullally, a former chief nursing officer, spoke about the importance of placing inequalities in minority communities within the broader context of health inequalities.

“Small groups are presenting to health services much later, when their symptoms have worsened,” she explained, and mental health is not considered accessible to all communities. Citing the reported experience of the Royal College of Nursing, she said: “Many black men have their first interaction with the service through the police during a crisis. »

Also on behalf of the absent Bishop of Gloucester, the Rt Revd Rachel Treweek, who is the CoE’s lead bishop for prisons, Bishop Mullally praised the Government for bringing forward long-awaited arrangements to end the use of prisons and police cells as locations. security.

“The right reverend prelate told me that last year more than 300 people suffering from mental health crises were taken not to hospital, but to a police station. According to the recent report of the Chief Inspector of Prisons, the average waiting time for transferring mentally ill people from prisons to hospitals is 85 days, or almost three months.

She also spoke about the impact of the shortage of mental health nurses and doctors on people detained under the Mental Health Act and in the community. “Learning disability nursing staff in the NHS have fallen by 44 per cent since records began in 2009,” she told the House.

The vice-president of the National Autistic Society, Lord Touhig, hopes the long-awaited reforms “will allow us to put an end once and for all to the myth that autism is a mental health problem.” Autism is certainly not a mental health problem, and our failure to address it has led to decades of autistic people being wrongly incarcerated, in appalling and degrading conditions, and deprived of their human rights.

Former Prime Minister Baroness May raised what was, for her, a fundamental question: “The fact that so many people who found themselves in a mental health crisis thought that in one way or another another, in those moments of crisis, they were people for whom things were impossible. made, to whom society did things, rather than people who were able to take part and be involved in this decision-making. They lost their human dignity in the processes they went through.

Lord Alderdice, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: “The truth is that none of us is simply an individual. We exist in the context of relationships. If we don’t find ways to build these relationships, simply operating on the basis of individual autonomy and human rights could actually create its own problems.

The bill now moves to committee stage.