Fast track for laws to ban shock therapy

The Government is to fast-track legislation ending the practice of administering electric shock therapy to mental health patients even if that patient has capacity and refuses the treatment.

A call to end the practice is just one of 165 recommendations in an expert group review of the Mental Health Act 2001 which the Department of Health published last night.

The expert group also recommends that it should no longer be possible to detain someone purely because he or she has a significant intellectual disability and that children aged 16-17 years should be presumed to have capacity to consent to or refuse admission and treatment.