You may have read that the iniquitous Mental Health Bill has not been included in this Parliament’s sessions. So thank you to everyone who responded to our call last summer to lodge a protest with the Health Minister.
The government was so overwhelmed by the public outcry that it has decided to think again.
The bad news is that, after considering all the responses, the government intends to reintroduce the legislation, albeit in a modified form.
As it stood, the Bill would have given unreasonable powers to healthworkers, including doctors, to forcibly enter homes of anyone they considered a risk to society and give them medication.
We can only hope that those sections in particular will now be removed, or at least dramatically altered.