Detention under the Mental Health Act

Interesting question, and yes social work is definitely a profession which can contradict standard anarchist principles, as part of the role is using state powers of enforcement. Although it's not quite as simple as that, as the idea at least is that they are used to protect individuals or children.

Personally I don't think I could live with the contradiction, however I know a bunch of good people who are social workers, and do their best in difficult circumstances. Our blogger sometimes explode works in mental health so I will let him know about this thread.

If you weren't aware of it there is this group of radical social workers, although I believe it may be a mostly SWP enterprise: http://www.socialworkfuture.org/

I had a good friend who was a psychiatric nurse and who staffed the locked ward in the hospital. I also had friends who i shared a flat with who all who had been sectioned at some time or other (with one ending up in Carstairs). And i was also later romantically involved with someone with manic depression or as it is now called, bi-polar disorder.

I often accused my psychiatric nurse friend of being an accomplice of "The System" by applying the "liquid cosh" or ECT until i discovered by living alongside those with mental health problems that some unpleasant treatments and interventions are necessary. I suppose a doctor will describe invasive surgery as an acceptable risk to avoid a greater threat to life and well-being.

I also at the time supported the concept of "care in the community" rather than hospitalisation until i discovered that such care was always minimal and the underlying reason was budgetary and cost-cutting rather than patients welfare. The local psychiatric hospitals and their grounds were sold off for housing developments.

If someone is not responsible for his or her actions due to an illness, it is incumbent upon family and friends to seek help from those with specialised knowledge, training and experience. You appear to be working as such a person who we resort to for assistance (even more vital in the cases for those individuals who do not have any person close to them for support)

In a future socialist/anarchist society, mental illness, some being organic and genetic, will still remain but most likely at a very much lower frequency and with a lot less social side-effects that intensifies the illness such as ostracisation and poverty.

I still recall my friend in a discussion about RD Laing saying that he hoped that schizophrenia was not caused by society and was something with a more physical cause because it was going to be damn lot easier to discover a pill to cure or control it than it will be to actually change the nature of this fucking capitalist society.

What can you do if you're caught in a position where your ethics collide with the functioning of the state. It is hard to look at suicide as a free act, in most cases, it probably isn't. What is free is the determinations to give in to it or turn away from it, which in your predicament as an anarchist working on behalf of state forces, you can still aide people through your individual relations. Other than that, help building a libertarian social organization that can supplant the current state organization you are employed in.

If it's affecting you personally enough you can always find another job that doesn't plague your conscience so much, but either way people are going to keep getting repressed through this, and you can at least say that at least when you are there, there is an anarchist presence that is questioning these repressive processes and learning about them in order to replace them with something more human, and hopefully challenging it directly when the moment arises.

Not much escape from the system but the system can't function healthily when there's pathogens in its blood.

The trouble is though. The system is the pathogen!

Yes, you're right.

Apsych

Hi everyone, bit of a difficult issue that's come up at work this week. I've been a patient in mental health services in the past but not for a long time, I now work in a mental health team (I'm a newly qualified social worker). As a patient I always saw the psychiatric system as very coercive, statist and oppressive-something to be resisted. I read a lot of anti-psychiatry texts (hence the name) and read alot about patient-led struggles against psychiatric abuse and oppression. My values have shifted recently since becoming a worker instead of a patient- On a good day, I feel like I've grown up a bit, on a bad day I feel like a sell out.

This came to a head last week. I had to detain one of my clients under the mental health act- the client clearly said he didn't want to go into hospital and resisted being taken in- I had to chase him around town for about 2 hours and in the end we called the police to bring him in to hospital, more or less kicking and screaming. (under the MHA a patient loses their right to refuse and is detained in hospital against their will for up to 6 months. They also lose their right to refuse treatment) I'm torn because on the one hand, he was a very high risk of suicide and he'd more than likely be dead if we hadn't detained him (I'm not exaggerating here either. I think he was planning to kill himself that day). On the other hand, it jars with me as an anarchist that I basically used legal powers to incarcerate someone against their will. It's made me question whether or not I should be doing the job I'm doing. There was a big part of me thinking "shit, that could have been me" which has obviously brought up a lot of stuff. From an ethical point of view it brings up questions like is life more important than freedom, do people have a 'right' to commit suicide etc.

The question I'm really asking is: Can detention in hospital under the mental health act ever be justified? It'd be good to hear from anyone who either works in mental health services or has used mental health services, especially if you yourself have been sectioned at some point. Was it the right thing for you?

If you ask me, if the person was a risk to themselves then you did the right thing.

I totally feel your pain - I trained as a social worker, but have ended up working in non-statutory homelessness services as I find I get more time with people, and dont have to gatekeep resources. Ive a lot of respect for people working in statutory with libertarian left politics though, as i think the amount of good you can do through direct contact with individuals, and also trying to influence your colleagues is still enormous, its just too much for me. I read this a lot when I was training:

https://www.scribd.com/doc/100202516/Anarchists-in-Social-Work-Known-to-the-Authorities-2nd-Edition

SWAN are not just awful in their politics, they also seem to be pretty ineffective. I'm really excited you're starting a health and social care workers industrial network. I would love to start something like this for housing and social care, in the same way that Concrete Action and Architects for social housing have mobilised architects to use thier knowledge to attack the systems they work within.

Ultimately it is the responsibility of the whole movement to imagine and implement alternatives to detaining people, and working in the world as it currently is, you are in a pretty difficult situation that you shouldnt have to take sole responsibility for.