Addiction & mental health
There is a full-frontal assault on the Mental Health Bill in the Independent.
(It is) ….. calling on MPs to accept a series of amendments put forward by the House of Lords, which psychiatrists, mental health charities and patients have said would help to create laws fit for the 21st century.
These include the demand that children be treated in wards suitable for their age, not with adults, and be assessed by specially trained professionals.
Today we also publish figures from the charity Young Minds which expose the “national scandal” of how children as young as 12 are incarcerated with often extremely disturbed adults and end up more traumatised than when they went in for treatment.
The study found that one child every day is admitted to an adult mental health ward under section; that more than three-quarters of girls are detained on mixed-sex wards; that the average stay is at least one month; and that children face a postcode lottery over beds.
But it is understood that the Government is not prepared to make any concessions and has put Labour MPs on a three-line whip in an attempt to bulldoze the Bill through.
I am unable to understand this dogmatic belief in the superiority of the govt position. Do they consider listening to other points of view a weakness in a contest of machismo?
Professor Sheila Hollins, president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists:
The House of Lords has amended the Bill in several important respects, refocusing provisions so that patients’ rights are properly safeguarded, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Mental Health Alliance agree that this is now a Bill which can be supported. Unfortunately, the Government has declared its intention to overturn some of the Lords’ amendments.
The introduction of supervised community treatment orders (SCTOs) is a key provision of the Bill. A recent international review of such orders carried out by the Institute of Psychiatry (which had been commissioned by the Department of Health) concluded that there was no evidence that SCTOs actually worked. Despite these findings, the Government is planning to proceed with SCTOs and to make provision in the Bill to the effect that patients who might fail to comply with their treatment following discharge could forcibly be returned to hospital.
Ignoring evidence that contradicts pet policies is a favoured govt trick. As is having an ulterior motive behind policy that claims to improve health:
One of the major failings, in our view, is that the Government has promised this Bill as a means of improving public safety, rather than seeking to improve mental health services for patients.
Not that the Independent has much credibility in this sector with their campaign to deny the dangers of Cannabis.
One of the key objections among experts, including the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Law Society, has been the concern that the Government’s reforms will increase the powers of psychiatrists to lock people up before they have committed any crime. Under existing laws, people had to be treatable for this to happen but ministers removed this treatability clause, much to the concern of psychiatrists and mental-health charities.
Then there is the “news” that the policy against drugs is a total failure. According to the Guardian:
The number of young people using cocaine and cannabis has increased rapidly over the past 20 years despite high-profile campaigns, such as the £9m ‘Frank’ initiative aimed at 11 to 15-year-olds, according to an in-depth examination of official efforts to tackle Britain’s chronic drug problem. It is also expected to claim that Britain’s ‘unusually severe drug problem compared with that of our European neighbours’ is linked to social and economic deprivation, that punitive laws have had little effect and that police efforts to disrupt the drugs trade have also failed.
The report will be launched on Wednesday by the new UK Drugs Policy Commission, whose members include distinguished figures from the worlds of health, policing, drugs research and academia. They include David Blakey, a former president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Annette Dale-Perera of the NHS-funded National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse and Professor Colin Blakemore, who leads the Medical Research Council.
The report cites an array of official statistics charting the steady growth in Britain’s drugs culture. For example, according to the 2005 British Crime Survey, 40.4 per cent of 16 to 19-year-olds have used drugs at some point in their lifetime, as have 49 per cent of 20 to 24-year-olds, 51.6 per cent of 25 to 29-year-olds and 45.8 per cent of 30 to 34-year-olds.
The Times weighs in:
The report, launched on Wednesday, will be seen as an indictment of decades of campaigning and government policy. The cost of drug-related crime is now reported at £13 billion a year, linked to the increase in the number of heroin addicts, reportedly up from 5,000 in 1975 to an estimated 281,000 now.
The three main tactics of ministers — media campaigns that heroin “screws you up†in the 1980s, initiatives in schools to educate children as young as seven, and targeting the most at-risk groups — have made virtually no difference, the report claims.
As does the Telegraph with it’s own take:
Up to one person in three arrested on suspicion of crimes in Britain is on hard drugs, the Government will be told this week.
A damning report will blame heroin and cocaine addicts for high levels of offending, particularly shoplifting, as they steal to fund their habit.
A spokesman for the charity DrugScope said that few among those arrested would be taking both heroin and cocaine. He also said that the proportion of suspects who were charged and found to be on hard drugs could be much higher - as many as six out of 10 - than the one in three figure for those who were arrested.
“As many as 60 per cent of those who are charged with criminal offences have some dependency on hard drugs so the figure related to arrests does not really tell the full story of the link between hard drugs and crime,” he said.
The lack of treatment facilities for addicts of course is a national problem & rather a long-standing one. Pretty much every doctor has jumped through hoops on a regular basis to get some help for their patients.
The paper’s publication will mark the launch of the UK Drug Policy Commission. The commission will analyse the impact of existing drug laws and investigate whether radical solutions, such as providing addicts with free heroin on the NHS, could reduce the harm done by drugs. It will be headed by Dame Ruth Runciman, who chaired the inquiry in 2000 that led to the Government relaxing the law on cannabis.
Let’s face it, at this stage pretty much anything is worth trying. It might also be worth buying up the supply, what with the failed policies in Afghanistan that have left the country with no other option but to produce drugs.
So then on to alcohol & the 24 hr drinking society:
Britain should consider making the legal drinking age 21 as it has “lost the plot” when it comes to regulating alcohol, claims the IPPR. Public Policy Research (PPR), the journal of the think-tank, says it is time to practice “tough love”, such as reviewing the minimum drinking age.
The UK has one of the worst problems in Europe with a fifth of children aged 11 to 15 drinking at least once a week.
“There is a sense that the regulatory landscape is lopsided.
“Licensing reform, resistance to a debate on taxation, the cancellation of the Alcohol Misuse Enforcement Campaigns which raised the profile of underage drinking issues - all happening at a time when alcohol-related harm is rising - seem to suggest the government is more concerned about making sure the drinks industry operates with as little interference as possible than with seriously grasping the nettle.”
I have to agree there. Industry has more say in policy than the public interest.
Another look in the Guardian:
Round-the-clock drinking was meant to uncork, even in the moodiest boulevards of Bognor, a sophisticated Left Bank cafe society, with bright young things charging glasses of chilled pinot grigio while discussing existentialist philosophy.
Alas, a year-and-a-half later, the nearest we typically come to existential angst in the early hours is when concerned friends asking paramedics: ‘Is she dead or just unconscious?‘
The number of medical procedures carried out by the NHS for alcohol-related conditions such as liver disease have doubled in a decade, to 262,844 a year. The number taken to A&E with alcohol-related injuries has also doubled since 1997, to 148,477 a year. This includes 8,299 under-18s, a 40 per cent increase in three years. Did you know - I certainly didn’t - that 22 per cent of 11-year-olds admit they have had a drink at some point? By 13, children who abstain are in a minority. Moreover, 30 per cent of the population are bingers and 15 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds are alcoholics.
If youngsters awake with sore heads, society is left with a hangover, too. There are 367,000 violent attacks a year caused by alcohol. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, 60 per cent of binge-drinkers admitted to criminal or disorderly behaviour. Drinkers were five times more likely to fight and 13 per cent of those excluded from school were suspended for drinking. Society no longer tolerates passive smoking, so why passive boozing, which is what innocent folk endure with a clunking fist on a Saturday night?
Booze drains into all areas of life. To raise the vulgar matter of money: alcohol problems lose Europe between 2 and 5 per cent of GNP. There is a link between binge-drinking and teenage pregnancies and evidence that drink leads to drugs.
The booze industry urges restraint, not regulation.
They would, wouldn’t they.
Which finally leads on the the question of treatment for all these societal ills, with the Guardian asking the question “what’s it really like in the Priory?”:
All I know is that if you ever find yourself drinking and/or taking drugs and not being able to stop, no matter how hard you try, no matter how hideous the consequences for you and the people around you, then you could do a lot worse than think about a brief spell in one of the many Priories or similar private and NHS treatment centres dotted around the UK. You probably won’t get to meet Kate Moss. But it might just save your life.