Yep and the support available isn’t enough. Our local mental health unit for ex drink/drug users has had a huge percentage of their patients kill themselves in the last few months.
Plus the crisis team is now the default instead of sectioning someone as no free beds. I have now dealt with two suicides in the last month where they have killed themselves directly after finishing the call with the crisis team.
Can the police section someone without a doctors say so?
Police can only section outside of someone’s home, then we have 24 hours (usually) to sit with them while the mental health team get the 3 people together to decide if they should be sectioned.
So don’t need anyone else’s say so to detain them, but then we literally sit with them to ensure their safety until mental health professionals can assess them as we aren’t mental health experts.
Can’t believe how bad things have got since the 90s.
At least then there were beds in mental health wards for addicts/alcoholics to detox,then a treatment centre to go after.
The beds have gone as well as many treatment centres.
These fuckers have made it so hard for many to get help.
Very much doubt even servere self harmers get access to the wards these days
Yep, I couldn’t tell you the number of times the 24 hours have run out without them being assessed in time so we just have to leave essentially.
Or in reverse they get sectioned but no bed is available for them, so they just stay on A&E. So they have one person sat in a corridor watching 2-3 beds on A&E and if/when one of them runs we get called. They almost always go in as a high risk missing person, so every available unit including PCSO’s and anyone else around go looking to find them.
So sectioning is not something police do lightly, not only is it removing a persons right of freedom for 24 hours. It is resource intensive and if no beds available they sit in a horrible boring limbo and I can’t blame them for doing a runner, but then this eats a lot of resources or absolute worst case they end up doing what they wanted originally and killing themselves.
Two years ago, there was almost always a bed, now it’s completely normal to see a nurse watching the patients in A&E awaiting beds.
The governments approach is irresponsible negligent in the extreme right now.
Positioning themselves as the party of law and order is worse than a joke from the joke thread… Drugs and alcohol constitute the largest threat to society in terms of ’ crime / anti social behaviour and mental health’.
For example: There are approx 85,000 prisoners in England and Wales of which 63% are described as ‘hazardous drinkers’. Add to this Drug addicts and its not rocket science to observe the correlation between mental health and crime. Sadly treating alcoholics or addicts as criminals does not heal the issue.
Treating people with addictions appropriately under the perspective of public health would be considerably more effective - As they have done in Portugal for example. Absurdly it’s cheaper to send someone to rehab than it is to imprison them ( £46,696 PA) but 'That’s not a good look to the blue rinse hard of thinking voters".
With so many people one paycheck from fucked removing the safety nets of rehabs and appropriate mental health care is utterly unacceptable. If you were to go out and ask what is the most important thing in life to anyone with a functioning mind they may respond ‘Health, because without it you’re fucked’
Tory party manifesto right there.
If only we had £350,000,000 a week to spend on the NHS
They still wouldn’t spend it on essential services.
Tax cuts for billionaires! Yay!
Also in NL mental healthcare is badly managed. They moved from centrally organised to municipalities, who don’t have any expertise on this, leading to long waiting lists as well.
Completely agree, it’s like not giving methadone out now, proven to reduce crime as they get a longer hit and don’t need the heroine in between and therefore the crime to pay for the heroine.
The new tags to stop alcohol misusers from reoffending don’t seem great either. First person I met wearing one was arrested after their baby died. They had been drinking since being released, seemingly not picked up by the ankle tag at all.
As you say, these people need help not arresting/prison over and over again.
‘Not held a surgery in Fitwick since March 2020…’ - clearly another yawning gap in the so called checks and balances to moderate the activities of public representatives (in her case stretching the bounds of the term representative somewhat).
After 6 months I’d have dragged her by the hair back to her constituency and she can either do her job or get booted with a box of her belongings onto the street.
Its all about the people tho…
One thing that surprises me about the Coutts/Farage affair is that Coutts must have some pretty nasty multi millionaires on their books many worse than Farage although that does take some doing so why get rid of Farage? Coutts has probably got quite a lot of questionable money/valuables slushing about in it’s vaults. The whole thing is very wierd.
Can’t say I’ve looked into it,and don’t understand how it came about.
Personally I’m utterly sick of the cunt,and all the Tory mps pandering to this utter wanker
