Mental Health in UK Law

In considering that wider question the matters to which a judge will invariably have to have regard to include (1) the extent to which the offender needs treatment for the mental disorder from which the offender suffers, (2) the extent to which the offending is attributable to the mental disorder, (3) the extent to which punishment is required and (4) the protection of the public including the regime for deciding release and the regime after release.

Bensaid is important for its statements of principle about the potential applicability of Article 8 in the context of mental health: the stress that the court placed on mental health as a crucial part of private life, associated with the aspect of moral integrity and on the preservation of mental stability as an indispensable precondition to effective enjoyment of the right to respect for private life.

In formulating policy that, save very exceptionally, management of serious mental illness in an IRC, if not "satisfactory", should precipitate release, the Home Secretary has adopted a word of extreme and appropriate elasticity. It catches a host of different factors to which the circumstances of the individual case may require her to have regard. I respectfully disagree with him only in relation to an aside in para 71 of his judgment.

It is subject to many cross-currents such as partiality, prejudice, self-interest and, above all, imagination and inaccuracy. Those are matters with which the jury, helped by cross-examination and common-sense, must do their best. But when a witness through physical (in which I include mental) disease or abnormality is not capable of giving a true or reliable account to the jury, it must surely be allowable for medical science to reveal this vital hidden fact to them.

Secondly, it appears from Mr Lloyd's note that at no stage of the hearing before the Tribunal announced their decision were the parties before the Tribunal informed of the findings of Dr Cashman as a result of his interview with H.

The first is that in my view mental health issues only fall to be considered under Chapter 55 where there is available objective medical evidence establishing that a detainee is, at the material time, suffering from mental health issues of sufficient seriousness as to warrant consideration of whether his circumstances are sufficiently exceptional to warrant his detention.

Indeed, in our experience where a tribunal refuses an application for a discharge it usually gives reasons for doing so that involve a positive finding that the patient is suffering from a mental disorder that warrants his or her continued detention.