Talk:Mental health in the United Kingdom

The hatchet job

I did indeed delete a large swathe of content, clearing out a load of paragraphs that felt like coat-racking, recentism and point of view.

I don't have time to explain everything in detail right now, but here's an example of one such paragraph:

Too many mental health beds have been cut causing a, “shameful practice” that patients are sent hundreds of miles from their homes for treatment, psychiatrists maintain. The Royal College of Psychiatrists is calling for the urgent creation of new mental health beds. Wendy Burn of the Rolyal College of Psychiatrists said, “Cuts in the number of mental health beds have gone too far and patients and their families are suffering as a result. It is clear that some parts of England urgently need more properly funded and staffed beds. Hundreds more are needed. Trusts struggling with dangerously high levels of bed occupancy are being forced to send seriously ill people hundreds of miles away from their homes for care. That must stop.” Some mental health trusts have all or nearly all their beds occuoied, though the college’s believes they should never be above 85% capacity. As an example, from April to June 2019, bed occupancy at Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust was 100%, it was 98.9% at the Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust in London and 97.2% at Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust. Trusts regularly send patients out of their areas though experts agree this is damaging. On the 31st of July 2019 in England 745 people were being treated outside their home area. The college reported 1,060 new beds are needed to reduce bed occupancy from 90% to 85%, which psychiatrists maintain is good for care. Vicki Nash of Mind said, “These figures are a stark reminder of the growing crisis in mental health. As demand increases it’s tantamount to negligence that beds are being cut in some areas without a viable alternative.”

It reads like an article from The Guardian that was haphazardly cherry-picked for the most outrage-inducing sentences. It kicks off with an opinion stated as a fact. Despite complaining about cuts to the number of beds, it doesn't give a sense of scale as to how many were cut (neither did the rest of the article, apart from an unsourced "30%" figure elsewhere), and what this was in relation to rising/falling demand. About a quarter of the paragraph is taken up by quotes from activists. The College's 85% figure gets repeated twice. 745 people were treated outside their home area but again, no sense of scale. The listing of trusts that were near-full is obvious cherry-picking.

There were loads of paragraphs like this. Anywikiuser (talk) 16:49, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Some of that stuff might possibly find a home somewhere else, but on the whole I think you did the right thing. Apart from any other consideration most of it only related to England. Rathfelder (talk) 20:23, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

I will have a look over the next few days and see if there's anything worth reinstating. Many of those paragraphs did discuss and raise important issues, but were not encyclopaedic. Anywikiuser (talk) 21:51, 21 January 2020 (UTC)