Mental Health Act

Introduction:

The right to mental health is a fundamental human right. The World Health Organization reflected this right as the utmost achievable standard of health in its constitution of 1946. In 1991, the United Nations General Assembly in its resolution embraced the “Principles for the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness and for the Improvement of Mental Health Care”. This doctrine constituted the foundation of devising mental health strategies around the world including Australia. The United Nations in 2007 formulated “Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities”; a treaty to promote, protect and ensure the rights and freedoms of people with disabilities. Mental health in NSW is governed under the NSW mental health act which came into operation in 2007.

Ethics of involuntary management:

The NSW mental health act sanctions involuntary assessment of people who are suspected to be mentally unwell. Critics claim that involuntary assessment and treatment under the mental health act is immoral. They maintain it to be in contradiction of the basic human rights and implicate infringement of civil independence. This argument gains further strength if after a comprehensive evaluation the individual is not found to be mentally unwell or necessitating to be involuntary managed. Cutler, Smith, Wand, Green, Dinh and Gribble (2013, pp. 544-549) in their research at Prince Alfred Hospital emergency department found that only 27% of the people scheduled by ambulance officers under the NSW mental health act ultimately ended up with an involuntary psychiatric admission [1]. Thus, certification of being “mentally ill” was a poor predictor of involuntary psychiatric admissions. This leads to a serious query whether the involuntar...

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