Mental Health Bill
Hi all, just wondering if anyone is working on a submission in response to the new mental health bill. It's a pretty complex piece of legalese and it would be good to have some discussion around what it really means. My reading of it has me wondering how it differs substantially from the current Mental Health Act. It is stated that the intent is to reduce or eliminate restrictive practices but I'm reading a lot of "unless...", "except when...", etc that still allows for the 'professionals' to override a persons rights if they are concerned about risk. I see the same issues as with the current act where I suspect it is driven more by risk to the clinician than risk to the person, whanau or community. As along as it protects clinicians who can always point to the "unlesses" they will continue to err on the side of reducing their own risk. Most of the time we cannot reliably predict who is and isn't going to cause harm so we are back to the crystal ball approach of the powerful clinician who can still disregard and override the rights of individuals. Maybe I'm not understanding something here but I'm pretty disappointed...