I loved the area where I worked as a PC – Winson Green in Birmingham.  For a young police officer, it was a brilliant grounding in the demands and complexities of police work and it involved more than the average dose of mental health incidents. Early one Sunday evening, my mate and I were driving […]

I have just finished a discussion about the conveyance of patients who are detained under the Mental Health Act.  This is a subject which has now reached the political level because the UK Home Secretary indicated in her speech to the Police Federation conference in May 2012 that she wanted to try to ensure that […]

Insanity is a legal concept not a medical one.  In fact, forensic psychiatrists who deal all day with mentally disordered offenders rarely use the term.  Often their use of it is with regard to their completion of psychiatric reports for the criminal courts.  Otherwise, as one psychiatrist recently said, “I don’t go to work and […]