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Where a person is in a public place and seems to be suffering from mental disorder, a constable may arrest him and take him to a place of safety. Once there, the person may be held for up to 72 hours, while he is assessed for detention under the Mental Health Act.
The relevant power is contained in section 136 of the Act and there have long been concerns that in some cases, mentally disordered people are present in a public place only because they have been enticed there by the police. Now, we have to ask whether section 136 is being used against people who aren’t even suffering from mental disorder.
This question is raised by the latest statistics on the use of the Mental Health Act. Anyone arrested under the Act may be taken either to a hospital or to a police station. The new statistics concern only the first group of people (which is probably smaller than the second), and they show that in the year to April 2009, the section 136 power was used almost 8,500 times. That represents an increase of 20 per cent on the year before, and of more than 300 per cent over the decade.
Perhaps there are more mentally disordered people outside hospital, and perhaps more of them find their way into public places. And yet the new statistics show that the number of people detained under the Mental Health Act has gone up, by two per cent in a year and by six per cent over the decade.
And the conversion rates are equally troubling, for of the people held in hospital under section 136, almost three-quarters were not detained once they had been assessed. That figure is itself up a quarter on the previous year, and by 330 per cent over the last ten years. Only 1,751 of these people were subsequently detained under section 2 or 3, which means that anyone taken to hospital as a place of safety is almost four times less likely to be discharged than to be detained.
These statistics concern only a minority of people arrested under section 136, yet they beg some uncomfortable questions: are constables really getting it so wrong? Are the signs of mental disorder so hard to discern, or is there another possibility? Could it be that the Mental Health Act arrest-power is being used to deal with people who are merely troublesome or inconvenient; that in many cases, it is directed at public - not mental - disorder?
