From Gil Blackwood, former States of Jersey consultant psychiatrist.
AS you have reported (JEP, 26 May), a man has been imprisoned for 2½ years for assaulting members of his family.

From your report, he seems to have suffered from recurrent mental illness and, at the time of the assaults, appears to have been showing for several weeks clear signs of relapse with increased irritability, agitation, and suicidal thought(s). His advocate stated that when he was taking his medication he was well.

You reported that there are a number of similar local cases and there is a belief that several should be treated in specialist forensic units, presumably in the UK. But that is very expensive. The States, Scrutiny, and the Health Minister are to consider how best to tackle the problem.

For many years several members of the senior clinical staff, who deal day-to-day with persons with recurrent severe mental illness, have been pressing the management to get an amendment to the Jersey Mental Health Law to allow for supervised community treatment orders.

Such orders are now commonplace in many other jurisdictions and it is now becoming scandalous that they are not an option in Jersey. Let me quote from the many publications on them and the relevance to this particular case will be obvious.

Supervised community treatment orders are a ‘legal intervention designed to benefit persons with serious mental illness who need ongoing psychiatric care and support to prevent relapse, hospital readmission, homelessness, or incarceration, but have difficulty following through with community-based treatment’.

They are used in the situation where ‘if the person does not receive continuing treatment or care and supervision in the community, it is likely, because of his/her mental illness, that he/she will cause serious bodily harm to himself/herself or someone else, or he/she will experience substantial mental or physical deterioration or physical impairment’.

The introduction of SCTs in Jersey should appropriately move some people with severe mental illness back from the prison/probation services to the mental health services. The services will have to adapt to the changes.

There was a timely report published last year on Jersey’s in-patient psychiatric services. It was carried out by the highly respected Health Care Commission from England.

At the time, we were promised in the Focus on Mental Health newsletter that the report was going to be made public, as is standard with all Health Care commission reports. However, that promise has not been kept and the report has never been circulated.

Perhaps, Mr Editor, you could ask for a copy.
St Helier.