Voluntary commitment is the act or practice of choosing to admit oneself to a psychiatric hospital, or other mental health facility. Unlike in involuntary commitment, the person is free to leave the hospital against medical advice, though there may be a requirement of a period of notice or that the leaving take place during daylight hours. In some jurisdictions, a distinction is drawn between formal and informal voluntary commitment, and this may have an effect on how much notice the individual must give before leaving the hospital. This period may be used for the hospital to use involuntary commitment procedures against the patient. People with mental illness can write psychiatric advance directives in which they can, in advance, consent to voluntary admission to a hospital and thus avoid involuntary commitment.
The Mental Health Act 1983 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It covers the reception, care and treatment of mentally disordered people, the management of their property and other related matters, forming part of the mental health law for the people in England and Wales. In particular, it provides the legislation by which people diagnosed with a mental disorder can be detained in a hospital or police custody and have their disorder assessed or treated against their wishes, informally known as "sectioning". Its use is reviewed and regulated by the Care Quality Commission. The Act was significantly amended by the Mental Health Act 2007. A white paper proposing changes to the act was published in 2021 following an independent review of the act by Simon Wessely.
Involuntary treatment refers to medical treatment undertaken without the consent of the person being treated. Involuntary treatment is permitted by law in some countries when overseen by the judiciary through court orders; other countries defer directly to the medical opinions of doctors.
Fulbourn Hospital is a mental health facility located between the Cambridgeshire village of Fulbourn and the Cambridge city boundary at Cherry Hinton, about 5 miles (8 km) south-east of the city centre. It is managed by the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust. The Ida Darwin Hospital site is situated behind Fulbourn Hospital. It is run and managed by the same trust, with both hospitals sharing the same facilities and staff pool.
Security of the person is a basic entitlement guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948. It is also a human right explicitly defined and guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights, the Constitution of Canada, the Constitution of South Africa and other laws around the world.
The Mental Capacity Act 2005 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom applying to England and Wales. Its primary purpose is to provide a legal framework for acting and making decisions on behalf of adults who lack the capacity to make particular decisions for themselves.
Healthcare in England is mainly provided by the National Health Service (NHS), a public body that provides healthcare to all permanent residents in England, that is free at the point of use. The body is one of four forming the UK National Health Service as health is a devolved matter, there are differences with the provisions for healthcare elsewhere in the United Kingdom, and in England it is overseen by NHS England. Though the public system dominates healthcare provision in England, private health care and a wide variety of alternative and complementary treatments are available for those willing and able to pay.
South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, also known as SLaM, is an NHS foundation trust based in London, England, which specialises in mental health. It comprises four psychiatric hospitals, the Ladywell Unit based at University Hospital Lewisham, and over 100 community sites and 300 clinical teams. SLaM forms part of the institutions that make up King's Health Partners, an academic health science centre.
Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights provides that everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. Liberty and security of the person are taken as a "compound" concept - security of the person has not been subject to separate interpretation by the Court.
Article 5 – Right to liberty and security
The Mental Disability Advocacy Center (MDAC) is an international human rights organisation founded in Hungary in 2002. It is headquartered in Budapest.
In R v Bournewood Community and Mental Health NHS Trust the House of Lords ruled that a man who had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital without capable consent had not been unlawfully detained under the common law. A later European Court of Human Rights ruling, however, found that the man had been unlawfully deprived of his liberty in the meaning of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
This disability rights timeline lists events outside the United States relating to the civil rights of people with disabilities, including court decisions, the passage of legislation, activists' actions, significant abuses of people with disabilities, and the founding of various organizations. Although the disability rights movement itself began in the 1960s, advocacy for the rights of people with disabilities started much earlier and continues to the present.
AH vs West London Mental Health Trust was a landmark case in England, which established a legal precedent in 2011 when Albert Laszlo Haines (AH), a patient in Broadmoor Hospital, a high security psychiatric hospital, was able to exercise a right to a fully open a public mental health review tribunal to hear his appeal for release. The case and the legal principles it affirmed have been described as opening up the secret world of tribunals and National Health Service secure units, and as having substantial ramifications for mental health professionals and solicitors, though how frequently patients will be willing or able to exercise the right is not yet clear.
A mental health tribunal is a specialist tribunal (hearing) empowered by law to adjudicate disputes about mental health treatment and detention, primarily by conducting independent reviews of patients diagnosed with mental disorders who are detained in psychiatric hospitals, or under outpatient commitment, and who may be subject to involuntary treatment.
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT) provides community, mental health and learning disability services in Cambridgeshire, England, and specialist services across the east of England and nationally.
Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, based in Nottinghamshire, England, manages the UK’s largest and most integrated Forensic High Secure facility Rampton Hospital near Retford, High Secure Women’s, High Secure Deaf, High Secure Learning Disability and Autistic as well as High Secure Men’s Mental Health), two medium secure units, Arnold Lodge in Leicester and Wathwood Hospital in Rotherham, and a low Secure Unit, the Wells Road Centre at Mapperley in Nottingham.
Involuntary commitment or civil commitment is a legal process through which an individual with symptoms of severe mental illness is court-ordered into treatment in a hospital (inpatient) or in the community (outpatient).
Inquest Charitable Trust is a charity concerned with state related deaths in England and Wales. It was founded in 1981. Inquest provides support on state-related deaths, including deaths in custody and their investigation, to bereaved people, lawyers, advice and support agencies, the media and parliamentarians. Their policy, parliamentary, campaigning and media work is grounded in the day-to-day experience of working with bereaved people.
In the Law of England and Wales, best interest decisions are decisions made on behalf of people who do not have mental capacity to make them for themselves at the time the decision needs to be taken. Someone who has the capacity to make a decision is said to be "capacitous". Since 2007, there has been a dedicated court with jurisdiction over mental capacity: the Court of Protection, although it mostly deals with adults. Most applications to make decisions on behalf of a child are still dealt with by the Family Court.
Alfie James Evans, was an infant boy from Liverpool with an undiagnosed neurodegenerative disorder, later revealed to be GABA-transaminase deficiency. The medical team and the child's parents disagreed about whether to maintain his life support or to withdraw it, resulting in a legal battle. Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust sought a declaration that continued mechanical ventilation was "unkind and inhumane", and not in the child’s best interests. Alfie's parents, Kate James and Thomas Evans, contested the application.