Tens of thousands of the most vulnerable patients are effectively being kept prisoner in care homes and hospitals through misuse of mental health laws, a damning House of Lords investigation has found.

In the worst cases, safeguards aimed at protecting patients with a range of conditions are being used to oppress people and force decisions on them, peers said.

They found measures supposed to be used to look after at-risk patients – such as those with dementia who might get lost if they left their care home – were being used on a significant scale to deprive them wrongly of their liberty.

The House of Lords committee set up to investigate how mental health reforms introduced in 2005 are working said it was so concerned about deprivation of liberty safeguards that they should be scrapped and a new system drawn up from scratch.

The committee chairman, Lord Hardie, said: "We were very concerned by what we heard about the safeguards. The evidence suggests that tens of thousands of people are being deprived of their liberty without the protection of the law, and without the protection that parliament intended.

"Worse still, in some cases the safeguards are being wilfully used to oppress individuals and to force decisions upon them, regardless of what actions may be in their best interests.

"The criticism of the safeguards extended to the legislative provisions themselves; we were told the provisions were poorly drafted, overly complex and bureaucratic. A senior judge described the experience of trying to write a judgment on the safeguards as feeling 'as if you have been in a washing machine and spin dryer'. Even if implementation could be improved, the legislation itself is flawed.

Social workers regularly try and get people sectioned. It is unwritten policy. It transfers responsibility to the NHS.

Care to back that up or have you made that up?

Social workers regularly try and get me sectioned. It is unwritten policy. It transfers responsibility to the NHS.

So what you mean is:


That's surely a different matter entirely.

Your having had some bad experiences with some social workers in a certain place means neither that social workers make it a personal habit to try to ram clients into the funny farm nor that your experience is repeated around the country.

Social workers regularly try and get people sectioned. It is unwritten policy. It transfers responsibility to the NHS.

and when they get transferred to the NHS there is always the LCP ...

... which has absolutely nothing to do with mental health.

You appear to be playing reverse Mallet's mallet

does it not, i beg to differ
but i prefer occams razor ...