Life, liberty & psychiatry

I spent my time as an undergraduate studying psychology, sociology and philosophy. It didn't get me very far - I was majoring in Accounting and Finance. After two years at college, bored with my course, I took a sabbatical and got a job as a nursing assistant on the psychiatric ward of a large general hospital.

The ward was designed to be a short-stay unit - none of the patients were supposed to spend longer than six months there. The idea being, within that time, the patient would be either discharged or transferred to long-term care. In reality, many of the patients had been on the ward for over a year, but none of the nurses had been there longer than six months. When I left to go back to university, I was the longest serving member of staff on the unit.

The place was understaffed, the nurses were undertrained and inexperienced, the doctors all but invisible, and the whole set-up was poorly resourced. Hardly an environment conducive to the relief of mental distress.

I suspect the lack of funding for psychiatric services is due, at least in part, to the social stigma attached to mental illness. Even today, the pervasive prejudice towards people with psychological problems seriously distorts public responses to mental health issues.

As an example, do a search for "schizophrenic" on BBC News and you'll get a list of murder reports, not news of recent medical advances or human interest stories. Or look at the way ASBOs are being used to manage the "anti-social" behavior of people with mental conditions. As the Observer reported on Sunday, some sufferers are in danger of being jailed if they publicly display symptoms.

Or take the Human Rights Act, which recognizes "the right to liberty and security of person" but explicitly denies that right to "persons of unsound mind" - a clause the British government seems keen to take advantage of with its proposals to ban people with mental health problems from leaving their homes.

It's like an old friend of mine once said: Human rights are a fine thing in principle. But how human do you have to be to get them?