Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Mental health legislation
- Section I The admission of patients to mental hospitals
- Section II Control of patients in the hospital and community
- Section III Patients' rights
- Chapter 8 Consent and treatment
- Chapter 9 Mental patients' rights and legal redress
- Chapter 10 The effectiveness of legal rights
- Section IV Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
Chapter 10 - The effectiveness of legal rights
from Section III - Patients' rights
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Mental health legislation
- Section I The admission of patients to mental hospitals
- Section II Control of patients in the hospital and community
- Section III Patients' rights
- Chapter 8 Consent and treatment
- Chapter 9 Mental patients' rights and legal redress
- Chapter 10 The effectiveness of legal rights
- Section IV Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In England and Wales we have pursued vigorously a campaign aimed at promoting legal rights for mental patients. The 1983 Act was the apotheosis of that. Some commentators have referred to the Act as a return to legalism defined as the control of mental patients by the rule of law and its accompanying regulations. This description of the 1983 Act is somewhat hyperbolic; it would be more true to say that some imbalances have been redressed and occasionally tipped in favour of the mental patient by reducing the discretion granted hitherto to the professionals. The method directed towards limiting discretion has been fashioned in the idiom of patients' rights, where rights are defined as the ability or power to alter existing legal arrangements and to impose on others a duty to accept those arrangements.
This is not to say that earlier legislation ignored the question of rights, rather that the rights granted were of the wrong sort. Rights under the 1959 Act, (and, for these purposes, we are talking of patients' rights as opposed to the rights of medical staff) were tied up with treatment, a right which appeared to dominate all else. The right to receive treatment implied a duty on the psychiatrist to provide the treatment. It followed therefore that decisions about treatment had to be placed in the hands of the professionals. The model of the physician/patient relationship was transferred to mental patients but with the added twist that mental patients were definitionally unable to make decisions for themselves.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Mental Disorder and Legal Control , pp. 166 - 184Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986