‘You may kiss the bride, but you may not open your mouth when you do so’: policies concerning sex, marriage and relationships in English forensic psychiatric facilities

In 1996, the Royal College of Psychiatrists recommended that all psychiatric facilities in the UK develop policies concerning sexuality and sexual expression for persons contained in those facilities. This paper analyses the prevalence and content of such policies in English forensic psychiatric facilities. While the College recommends an individualised approach to sexual and emotional relationships, most hospitals in fact either prohibit or actively discourage such expression as a matter of policy. The paper considers the advantages and disadvantages of that approach. The paper also considers the legal issues surrounding these policies, and in particular the legal authority for governing the sexual and emotional expression of hospital residents and the relevant human rights implications

Legal Knowledge of Mental Health Professionals: Report of a National Survey

This article presents findings from a national postal survey of knowledge of mental health law amongst psychiatrists, GPs, approved social workers and Mental Health Act Commissioners, conducted in England and Wales. The study was designed to assess (amongst other matters) the relative levels of legal knowledge between and within these professional groups. Data from 2022 respondents revealed considerable discrepancies in knowledge scores. Commissioners, approved psychiatrists and approved social workers achieved the highest scores, and non-approved GPs the lowest scores. Within-group differences, for doctors, were correlated with levels of day-to-day experience in using the Mental Health Act and, for approved social workers, with training. The article concludes that the advisability of maintaining the statutory role of GPs in its current form is questionable, given the preponderance of poorly performing GPs. Both use of the Act and training were important in sustaining practitioners’ legal knowledge

Renormalization group and perfect operators for stochastic differential equations

We develop renormalization group methods for solving partial and stochastic differential equations on coarse meshes. Renormalization group transformations are used to calculate the precise effect of small scale dynamics on the dynamics at the mesh size. The fixed point of these transformations yields a perfect operator: an exact representation of physical observables on the mesh scale with minimal lattice artifacts. We apply the formalism to simple nonlinear models of critical dynamics, and show how the method leads to an improvement in the computational performance of Monte Carlo methods.Comment: 35 pages, 16 figure