“The disparities in physical health outcomes for people with mental illness are currently regarded as a human rights scandal. Patients with serious mental illness are two to three times as likely to have obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases – which impact on quality of life and recovery, while contributing towards a 20-year gap in life expectancy currently experienced by this underserved population.
Dr Joseph Firth”
Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust (GMMH) is under fire due to policy changes that are said to be limiting peer advocacy and service user involvement.
In January, GMMH published its latest service user and carer engagement policy (SCE), which changed the definition of “service user” to mean anyone who has been discharged from its mental health services within the last 12 months. Only they are allowed to be involved in decision making about GMMH services.
My first contact with Liverpool Mental Health Consortium (LMHC) was in February 2003, when I wrote them a very terse letter complaining bitterly that I had been unable to access a place at their national Snakes & Ladders Conference & denouncing them for exclusivity & poor communication.
Fast-forward 9 months, & they advertised a post with a person specification clearly stating that lived experience of mental distress was a ‘desirable quality’.
Andy’s Man Club was established by Luke Ambler in 2016 after his brother-in-law Andy committed suicide. It is a volunteer led organisation in which men suffering from mental health problems, including suicidal tendencies, can go for help.
Mental health worker asked vulnerable woman to perform sex act on herself
David Kelly, 52, encouraged the victim, who has schizophrenia and a number of other conditions, to touch herself intimately, after turning up at her home.
She was said to have been left feeling ‘embarrassed and ashamed’ by the incident and has struggled to comes to terms with it.
“Scandalous” waits to get mental health patients access to treatment are letting down vulnerable people and wasting police resources, an MP said.
A Freedom of Information request by Lib Dem MP Norman Lamb found some patients detained by police faced long waits for doctors, beds or ambulances.
By Ross HawkinsPolitical correspondent, BBC Radio 4 Today Police chiefs in England and Wales say they may be unlawfully detaining arrested people needing mental health care more than 2,000 times a year. Some people have been held in police cells for several days because there is no hospital bed for them, the National Police […]
There’s been a big increase in cases of abuse concerning Salford’s vulnerable and elderly people, rising from 492 referrals in 2015/16, to 731 in 2016/17, up by 33%.
The number of compulsory mental health treatments in Scotland has hit its highest level in at least 15 years, according to a watchdog report.
Mental health staff in the UK are working in a “powder keg” environment, as assaults by patients soar, a BBC investigation has revealed.
Figures obtained by 5 live Investigates show there were more than 42,000 reported attacks on staff in 2016-17 in the mental health trusts who responded.
