Protests are currently going on in the U.K. over Britain’s two-tier system of criminal justice, but it turns out that the U.K. has a two-tier mental health system, too:
NHS doctors are under pressure not to section psychotic black patients to avoid appearing racist.
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Nine current and former NHS psychiatrists reported being encouraged to limit the number of black patients they section under the Mental Health Act to avoid them being over-represented.Black people are 3.5 times more likely to be detained by mental health services than white people. In response to this, the NHS has rolled out positive discrimination policies.
“Positive discrimination” is discrimination against whites. There is zero reason to think that British psychiatrists are prejudiced against black people, and there are obvious reasons for the mental health disparity. The last of these is interesting:
[D]octors argued the term over-representation is “morally loaded”, and pointed to numerous factors that contribute to high rates of black detentions besides NHS racism, including family breakdown, school exclusion, absent fatherhood, social deprivation and cannabis use.
This physician makes the point succinctly:
One former NHS doctor said: “Once a patient has psychosis, we shouldn’t perform sociology, we should perform medicine.”
Much as the Henry Nowak case has focused public attention on two-tier policing, the Valdo Calocane case brought notoriety to two-tier mental health. Calocane was a paranoid schizophrenic who went on a stabbing spree in 2023. He murdered three people and wounded several more. The first victims were 19 year old university students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley, who were attacked as they returned to the Nottingham University campus late at night. Hours later, Calocane murdered a school caretaker, Ian Coates. These are Calocane’s victims:
Calocane, a paranoid schizophrenic, had repeatedly refused medication but was not sectioned after a previous violent incident by mental health workers who cited the “over-representation of black men” in custody.
A former doctor who worked at the same trust where Valdo Calocane was treated said the watchdog visited his hospital ward shortly before the Nottingham killer’s attack and he was told there were too many black patients.
Race discrimination is getting people killed.
These incidents happened in the U.K., but they are typical across much of the West. They help to explain why almost no one has faith in institutions.
