After a year of Parliamentary scrutiny, the Mental Health Bill has finally passed through Parliament and will become law.  This is a massive step forward in ending the inappropriate detention of autistic people in mental health hospitals.

Tim Nicholls, former Assistant Director of Policy, Research, and Strategy at the National Autistic Society, has written a blog post to celebrate the passage of the Bill and what this means for autistic people.

The Mental Health Bill: this is a vital change, long in the making

As the Mental Health Bill finally concludes its passage through Parliament, it is a cause for celebration. This is a huge step in securing autistic people’s rights to better care and respect for their liberty. It has been incredibly hard-fought, taking a decade to achieve. There is no doubt in my mind that our movement should be proud of what it has achieved. 

Autistic people should not be detained in mental health hospitals just because they are autistic, and all too often because they have not received the support they need and have reached crisis. In my years campaigning on this issue, it has always struck me as the most perversely unfair aspect of what currently happens: that the state, which has various duties to provide support to autistic people, can use its own failure to provide this support as a reason to deprive an autistic person of their liberty. It is just wrong.

That’s what we’ve been campaigning to end and why the changes in the Mental Health Bill are so significant. I’m pleased that so many of the changes we have advocated for in recent years are now enshrined in that Bill. Removing autism from the definition of “mental disorder” in relation to section 3 of the Mental Health Act means that people cannot be detained long-term just because they’re autistic. Other safeguards, such as a requirement for a therapeutic benefit to admission and the absence of a less restrictive alternative, are also key. But, for me, the key to the reforms’ success will be the new duty to provide sufficient support to meet autistic people’s needs in the community to prevent admissions in the first place. 

The National Autistic Society, Mencap, the Challenging Behaviour Foundation, VoiceAbility and others have pushed hard for the Mental Health Bill to mandate a plan for how this new duty to provide services will be implemented. Without that plan, we worry it simply wouldn’t happen. So I was overjoyed to see Jen Craft MP secure commitments from the Government at the last possible minute. We will hold the Government to account on its commitment.

The reasons for holding the Government to its promises are clear: without them, autistic people’s rights will still be at risk. The saddest thing about what we have finally won in our campaign is that it is the result of countless tragedies and lives forever changed by a system that is failing autistic people. From Winterbourne View and Whorlton Hall to the stories we captured in our Transforming Care: Our Stories report and countless news pieces, every one of them was someone who was failed. 

The only thing that can provide any form of justice is to make sure it never happens again.