Proposals for managing dangerous people with severe personality disorder: New legislation and new follies in a historical context

Abstract

Current proposals in England and Wales to ' capture' an ill-defined group of anti-social and violent people within the widest possible definition of mental disorder, and thereby to detain them under proposed new mental health legislation, is criticized and critiqued on intellectual, ethical and pragmatic grounds. The view is taken that psychiatrists must utterly reject these proposals which, if adopted, would make them primarily agents of social control. Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals must fight to retain the essentials of ethical and effective treatment earned trust and primary responsibility to the individual patient which these proposals seek to undermine and pervert.