Rights and the Mental Health Act

What is the Mental Health Act?

The Mental Health Act is a collection of laws dictating the treatment someone living with a mental illness receives, when they receive it, and for how long.

Introduced in England and Wales in 1983, and updated in 2007, The Mental Health Act:

• Allows you to be detained in hospital, against your will, if deemed a risk to yourself or others.
• Removes your right to refuse treatment.
• Lets professionals decide the length of your detainment.
• States you should only be detained if there are no other options.

Under the Mental Health Act, you have the right to an advocate to explain the information about your section, to appeal against your section, meet with hospital managers, have visitors, receive after-care, make complaints, and more.

Fighting for change

Too many people detained under the Mental Health Act feel disregarded with no involvement in the care they receive.

The Mental Health Act should be person-centred. Patients should be treated as individuals, including taking into account the patient’s race and other protected characteristics to ensure prejudice or racism do not feature in their care.

Very few people who have been detained were unaware they had the right to make advanced decisions about their treatment before an eventual stay in hospital.

A lack of information means people often find difficult to understand which professionals they could access for support, and at what stage.

These issues continue to roll on and we want to change that.

Whether it’s empowering people to tell their story of being detained, campaigning for MPs to implement our recommended changes to the Mental Health Act, holding the government to account when they announced The Mental Health Bill and ignored its racial inequalities, we vow to keep fighting until The Mental Health Act is where it needs to be.

The Mental Capacity (Amendment) Bill

If you are deemed to lack capacity to make all, or some, decisions for yourself about your care because of a mental illness or other condition, The Mental Capacity Act (1983) is designed to protect and empower you. 

In 2018, the Government announced plans to amend the Bill which raised concerns over the safeguarding of people with fluctuating capacity and the conditions that can be set to allow people who recover mid-way through detention to leave earlier.