AIBU to think mental health crises should not be treated as antisocial behaviour

[Serencwtch]

TW: Some references to suicide.

In my local area Police have started a new initiative to reduce the demands & costs involved in attending to 'concern for welfare'/mental health crisis type calls.

They have issued a number of formal enforcement notices and warnings using Antisocial Behaviour legislation to people who have caused inconvenience through mental health crisis/suicide attempts in public places. These enforcements are community protection warning (CPW), Community Protection Notice (CPN) & Criminal Behaviour Orders (CBO).

I know one individual very well who has received one of these & they were very distressed by it & have now become very withdrawn & secretive. It's also difficult as a loved one as if I was concerned this person may be at risk I would be hesitant to involve emergency services as even a call to ambulance would likely result in police attendance & therefore have criminal implications for them. I also can see that it has increased their risk but in a more secretive & less public way. No doubt police consider this a success as they have not been called out to them.

I fully understand the pressures on police, I have friends & family that have served as officers & police staff. The funding cuts are every bit as bad as NHS or social care but with less public awareness.

This doesn't sit right with me at all. I think it's misuse of legislation designed to tackle antisocial behaviour & that a mental health crisis/someone attempting to take their life should not be labelled as antisocial behaviour.

Yes absolutely. It's a specific question regarding the suicide attempts themselves being labelled as antisocial behaviour.

They have had contact with the criminal justice system through other incidents not related to suicide (which is very common in care-experienced young people )

This post makes no sense. The person was sectioned. That means they can’t control the behavior that lead up to the section (most likely due to being in psychosis) you don’t get sectioned when you can control yourself

Neither is criminalising it. People don’t get to avoid real life by expecting the police punish traumatic human events egregiously.

It's not me, No. I'm very definitely no longer a teenager & these measures weren't in place when I was going through that. I was always treated with care & respect by police & mental health services were not as stretched as they are now

But any how that's not the debate.

It's about the criminalizing of mental distress in that way.

Section 136 is for assessment only, and I don't think the issue of "whether you can control yourself" is what determines that you can be held in this way. (I also don't imagine that the person has psychosis, on the basis of what has been posted, though naturally I could be wrong about that.)

Lots of people suffer with their mental health and have suicidal thoughts and have conditions that are not easily treated. They don’t all need to go to very public places to make suicide attempts. People who actually do die by suicide usually have chosen a rather quieter and less broadcast method. Someone who repeatedly engages in this behaviour is not intending to end their life they are intending to attract attention in a maladaptive fashion. They are still deserving of help but they need to learn to manage their distress in a different way than this. In the end the police will likely drop you home and say to call 111 or drop you to A&E so you can cut out the middleman man and just do one of those without involving the poor police in the drama and leave them to respond to crime.

Again, categorically not what you have said in numerous other posts and threads. Aside from being a teen, the parallels are extraordinary.

anyway by the way - you weren’t there (you say)…. Say really, I’m going to trust the police who were actually there on this one

We could put more money into mental health services and alongside that make them truly person centered.

I took so many calls over two decades in my previous job from people desperate for help, for themselves or a loved one. People who were turned away by the NHS, who couldn't get a GP appointment, who didn't meet the threshold for secondary care. One of the last ones I took, the person later killed themself. Sometimes the person had emailed dozens of people, I'd respond and they'd come back to me thanking me for being the only person who had.

There is so, so much unmet need out there, people who are pleading for help - and that's before you get to the hard to reach people, those who don't want to engage.

Yes there are always very similar comments on posts local to me too & I feel sad at the lack of compassion shown

If someone survived one of these attempts would issuing them with a caution or behavioural order be okay? That's what concerns me.

Yes it's a huge inconvenience - I missed an important family event due to a concern for safety on the M4 but I wouldn't want that individual punished for that inconvenience

S136 is a police power. The police are not good at determine who is mentally ill. They quite frequently deploy it on drunk or high people. Very rarely is anyone in a S136 in fact psychotic. I would not take use of a S136 to be diagnostic

You haven’t sat for 4 hours on a train
knowing your child is at nursery, with no other child and the staff are staying late and very pissed pff have you and racking up fees for every 15 mins late?

A section 136 is a police section it gives them the powers to take somone ,in public who they beleive is acting in way ,that means they maybe suffering with a mentalhealth crisis to a place of safety( this was the 136 suite in the mental health trust i worked for )to be assesed by a mental health professional ,obviously the police are not mental health professionals themselves and sometimes after assement the person brought in by the police maybe assesed as fit to leave.

It's not meant to be diagnostic. Police have no training or qualifications to be able to diagnose.

S136 is a power to remove someone 'suspected of having a mentally disorder' to a place of safety.

Someone attempting suicide would be detained on s136 that's fairly standard & there would be serious questions if police attended a suicide attempt & did not detain that person

It’s not rare at all. I was visiting a hospital last month and the 4 people brought in under section were all psychotic (acute ward, admittedly)

of course the police don’t diagnose. They also generally don’t lose officers to accompanying sectioned people unless they need to.

That could be true, it’s too soon to be able to tell. The current reality is that as it is this is not workable for the police. My thinking is this is an attempt to put pressure back on the services that should be responsible for care in the first place, and as @Shrinkhole mentioned in their post, this is an intervention for a repeated pattern of behaviour, likely not a one off crisis.

You mentioned in a previous post that this person was assessed under Section 136 4x in one year and discharged each time. May I ask the reasoning given for the discharges?

I think not. I think even dreaming up such an initiative is self righteous and ignorant

they should think of the young woman who slipped from a bridge after changing her mind and pleading with a stranger to help her before she fell to her death aged 25

What if it was your child though?

Are you really asking such a bizarre and daft question? How would I feel if I was delayed on a train because my child had committed suicide on the tracks?

What's the larger story - was this a one off first time there's ever been a concern in public or is this part of a wider they've made many attempts kinda vibe?

The assessment is a mental health act assessment and they were assessed as not meeting criteria for detention under a section of the mental health act.

There is virtually no capacity for voluntary admission locally & long waiting lists for a bed even when detained.

4 times in 6 months at the same location.

It is about how the person chooses to cope with that distress not the distress itself. What is wrong with calling a helpline or going to A&E instead? They need to learn a different way of coping.
If they were fast tracked to see a psychiatrist what do you imagine a psychiatrist would do for this? There are usually no medications for the kind of conditions that cause people to behave in these ways. Prolonged psychotherapy would be required for which some commitment and motivation for change is a pre requisite. There are no easy answers.
MH services are not to blame either.
The person ultimately to blame is this persons abuser.

If the positions were reversed. If it was your child up there with the police negotiator desperately trying to persuade them to come to safety - how would you feel about people grumbling about the delays.

Well in that case an order is very much justified. They need to be deterred from this behaviour that is helping no one and to engage with more constructive options. Admission cannot help an issue like this.

I think YABU because these cases are very complex and it really does take a lot for police to take such steps!