Luciana Berger – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-03-03.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many people of each (a) gender and (b) ethnicity were sectioned under the Mental Health Act 1983 in each of the last five years.

Alistair Burt

The information requested is not available between 2010/11 and 2013/14 as comparable data was not collected during these years due to changes in the way the data was categorised and collected and variations in the number of organisations which reported in some years. Data for 2014/15 are provided in the table below.

Number of detentions and short term orders under the Mental Health Act 1983 by gender and ethnic group: 2014/15

	Detentions	Short-term orders
Detentions and Orders	41,592	19,648
Male	22,016	10,651
Female	19,566	8,989
White	30,322	14,954
Mixed	938	444
Asian or Asian British	2,714	924
Black or Black British	4,368	1,438
Other Ethnic Groups	1,219	531

Source: Mental Health Minimum Data Set/Mental Health & Learning Disabilities Data Set 2014/15

Notes:

1. The numbers in this table represent the number of uses of the Mental Health Act 1983, not the number of individuals who were subject to the Act.
2. Mental Health Minimum Data Set (MHMDS) is not the official data source for statistics about uses of the Mental Health Act 1983 but it is the only one that provides national information about gender and ethnic group. The MHMDS are known to under represent uses of the Mental Health Act 1983.
3. The data source for official statistics about uses of the Mental Health Act 1983 is the KP90 collection, with figures published in the annual statistical release: Inpatients Formally Detained in Hospitals Under the Mental Health Act 1983 and Patients Subject to Supervised Community Treatment, England. Therefore, the data in the table may differ from data in the official published statistics.
4. Counts by ethnicity and gender may not sum exactly to the overall total because for some people this information was invalid or not recorded.
5. Detentions includes: detentions under Part ll, detentions under Part lll, detentions under previous legislation (Fifth Schedule) and other Acts, detentions subsequent to admission, detentions following use of a Place of Safety Order and detentions following revocation of a Community Treatment Order.
6. Short-term orders are defined as those of no greater than 72 hours’ duration and involving uses of sections 4 and 5 and sections 135 and 136.