‘Offenders, Deviants or Patients’ - Comments on Part Two of the White Paper

The Government White Paper Reforming the Mental Health Act follows closely on the heels of the Green Paper - Reform of the Mental Health Act, 1983 which derives from (but also departs from in many respects) the Report of the Expert Committee chaired by Professor Genevra Richardson. One could say, with some justification, that mental health professionals have been ‘deluged’ with paper in this area in the past year or two, so that trying to discern trends has become very difficult. In particular, the material in the White Paper is somewhat closely written and needs to be read with a good deal of care (or, so it seemed to me). To complicate matters further, offender-patients are also discussed in Part I of the White Paper (The Legal Framework) whereas it would have been more logical to have dealt with the proposed provisions for them in Part II. For clarity, I propose to deal with all these matters under one heading

Psychopathic Disorder – Concept or Chimera

This paper, which is divided into five parts, has been prompted by the continuing interest in the complex and emotive topic of psychopathic disorder1 and the possibility of a government Bill aimed at revising the current mental health legislation being introduced in 2003. The unclear nature of the condition and the controversies surrounding it are well encapsulated in the two quotations that head this paper. One or two other literary allusions will also be called in aid later

Mental Health Inquiries – Views from the Chair

The data to be presented in this contribution form part of a more detailed account which will appear as a Chapter in a book entitled ‘The Age of the Inquiry’ edited by Nicky Stanley and Jill Manthorpe of Hull University, for Routledge (April 2004). The material is produced here with their kind permission. My brief from the editors was to write about my experiences of chairing mental health inquiries since hardly anything seemed to have been written about how those who chair inquiries and their colleagues viewed the problems they encountered. Although I had chaired three mental health inquiries I considered that my own responses might be seen as somewhat idiosyncratic and partial. I therefore decided to solicit the views of a small number of those who had also chaired such inquiries in the mental health field, including, in the main, homicide inquiries

Incapacitating the Dangerous in England and Wales: High Expectations - Harsh Reality

This presentation offers some brief comments on the socio-historical concept of ‘dangerousness’, legal and sentencing issues in contemporary context, problems of definition and, finally, some clinical considerations in the light of the foregoing discussion. A number of these issues are discussed more fully in my book ‘Will They Do it Again?