by Our News Desk

YOUNG people face “horrific” and “brutal” conditions when sectioned in mental health hospitals, with inspectors failing to stop abuse.

That is the claim made by Parliament’s human rights committee in a scathing report out today.

MPs and peers said “terrible suffering” was being inflicted on psychiatric ward patients who have autism and learning disabilities, “causing anguish to their distraught families.”

The politicians said they had “lost confidence” in the mental health system and slammed the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the official watchdog.

In a remarkable comment, the MPs said “a regulator which gets it wrong is worse than no regulator at all.”
 
They said it has been “left to the media … to expose abuse.”

One young man with learning disabilities told the parliamentary committee that his experience in a psychiatric ward felt “like some sort of nightmare.”

Speaking anonymously, he said: “It was not a safe place. It was not a treatment room. I got no assessment or treatment done. 

“There was no care. I was just put in this room, and I lay there and went to sleep.”
 
Julie Newcombe, whose son Jamie was detained for 19 months under the Mental Health Act, told MPs: “He had his arm broken in a restraint … His arm was wrenched up behind his back until the bone snapped. 

“He was then not taken to accident and emergency for 24 hours, even though his arm was completely swollen.”

She said another parent’s child, who was kept in seclusion for up to nine hours at a time, “started to bang his head against the wall and would bite the wood in the door frame out of desperation.” 

The committee found that detaining those with learning disabilities or autism “is often inappropriate” and warned that it causes “suffering and does long-term damage.”

It said the “biggest barrier to progress is a lack of political focus and accountability to drive change.

“A No 10 unit with Cabinet-level leadership is required to urgently drive forward reform.”

CQC chief executive Ian Trenholm said it was “working hard” to improve “how we regulate mental health, learning disability and/or autism services so we can get better at spotting poor care and at using the information people give us.”