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Lessons from the Mental Health Act Commission for England and Wales: the limitations of legalism-plus-safeguards
- Author:
- PILGRIM David
- Journal article citation:
- Journal of Social Policy, 41(1), January 2012, pp.61-81.
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Place of publication:
- Cambridge
The Mental Health Act Commission for England and Wales was closed down in 2009. This article uses data from its final report to provide a snapshot between social group membership and mental health status in modern society. The focus of the report was on race, gender and age in settings that have become more coercive and less therapeutic over time. This article uses some aspects of the report to discuss the implications of lawful psychiatric coercion being predicted by social group membership. The work of the Commission furnished useful information in this regard, but its framework for data collection could not illuminate a more established picture of the class gradient in mental health problems. This article considers how material adversity may explain the racial patterning of coercively detained psychiatric populations, and how normative aspects of risk-taking in the community and in hospital may explain the findings on age and gender. The article concludes by querying the ameliorative impact of government appointed ‘visitorial’ bodies. It argues that legalism-plus-safeguards is a questionable basis for meaningfully bringing discriminatory powers to book, or for reversing the differential impact of pathogenic social forces.