MENTAL health patients living in the community will be compelled to take medication or face detention in hospital, under radical government plans disclosed yesterday.

The measures will also allow the compulsory detention of patients who are a risk to themselves or their community but who have not committed an offence, provided “appropriate treatment” can be offered.

The controversial proposals were published yesterday as the Government abandoned plans to introduce a lengthy and complex new mental health Bill in the face of fierce opposition from psychiatrists, mental health groups and civil liberties groups. Instead, a few selected measures from the draft legislation will be wrapped up into a shorter amendment Bill that will be tacked on to the existing law.

But any hopes that the Government had of completely winning over its critics were dashed when mental health campaigners complained that it had left in “all of the bad elements of the original proposals and left out all the good”.

One purpose of new proposals is to close a loophole that allows patients with dangerous and severe personality disorders to avoid detention in mental hospitals if doctors consider their condition “untreatable”.

The new amendments will replace the “treatability” test with a requirement that appropriate treatment must be available.

Louis Appleby, the Government’s National Director for Mental Health, insisted that “appropriate treatment” would have to be of “therapeutic benefit” to the patient, although a Department of Health spokeswoman later conceded that doctors would not be required to determine “in advance whether treatment was beneficial or not”.

Sophie Corlett, of the mental health charity Mind, said it was not clear what would happen to those who doctors believed to be untreatable. “Without meaningful treatment, detention is simply a punishment, applied to people who have not even committed a crime,” she said.

Tony Zigmond, honorary vice-president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, agreed: “An important principle must be that we only deprive people of their liberty when we can offer treatment that will be of benefit to them.” But Michael Howlett, of the Zito Trust, welcomed the new measures. It was simply wrong for psychiatrists to assume that certain people with personality disorders were untreatable, when new research showed that they could be.

“Many successful therapeutic interventions are being used by people in the field,” he said.

The reforms were mooted eight years ago after a series of murders by mentally ill people, including that of Dr Lin Russell and her six-year-old daughter, Megan, in 1966 by Michael Stone in Chillenden, Kent. Stone had had a severe personality disorder diagnosed.

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