Understanding Treatment Without Consent

In "Understanding Treatment without Consent", the authors examine the work of the Mental Health Act Commission (MHAC), established to ensure the care and rights of people subjected to the various sections of the 1983 Mental Health Act. The book emerges from a Department of Health funded research project, which analysed the data held by the MHAC and informed the government's review of the Mental Health Act. The authors include that analysis and other issues that arose from the project in the pages of this text, but their aim is to go beyond that research project, and to offer a broader exploration of mental health provision in both historical and contemporary contexts, discussing whether mental health reforms have learned the lessons of history. The book is designed to complement earlier work on treatment without consent by Phil Fennell, by providing a more policy-oriented account of mental health law and regulation in the context of health service modernization, discussing contemporary issues facing the MHAC and looking at its future role and, in particular, its planned merger with the Health Care commission in 2008.