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James Wooldridge probably knows more than most about the compulsory mental health treatment the government appears keen to extend.

The 39 year old from Devon admits that the number of times he has been sectioned is "well into double figures".

His first taste of forced treatment was at the age of 18 while he was undergoing military training at Sandhurst academy. He became ill after his parents' "nasty divorce" and was locked in a guardroom without food or water while he waited for his parents to pick him up.


Wooldridge admits he behaved "riotously" after arriving home and within 24 hours he was sectioned. He remembers a group of strangers entering the house, pinning him down on his bed and forcibly injecting him before taking him to a "grim" hospital ward.

He tried to flee, believing that his experiences were still part of army training and a new nerve agent was being tested on him, but he was eventually surrounded by 15 staff.

"I felt like a cornered rat, very scared," he says. "The only kind face I saw as I was being injected with two or three people on every limb was a student nurse who just smiled."

Although he has worked all his adult life, including eight years as a retained firefighter and time as a mental health awareness worker, Wooldridge admits he damaged property and threatened people while he was ill, but says he has never been violent.

Diagnosed with bipolar schizoaffective disorder, he has had long periods of stability but powerful memories of forced treatment during some of the relapses.

He recalls being pinned down on the floor as a nurse forcibly injected him twice in the same place on his buttocks. "I remember taking a door wedge and almost biting through it with pain," he says.

He felt so much discomfort he could not sleep or sit for days but was offered no pain relief. "I wonder how some of the government officials would cope with such an event happening in their lives," he asks.

The government says its proposals to extend compulsion in the draft Mental Health Bill are needed to protect the public. It plans to allow compulsory treatment for people with a mental disorder, if it is necessary to stop them harming themselves or to protect others, even if there is no therapeutic benefit. It also proposes removing the requirement that a person's condition is serious enough to need hospital treatment, allowing compulsory treatment in the community.

Mind says more than 45,000 people were detained under the Mental Health Act 1983 in England last year, equivalent to 88 in every 100,000 of the population.

Although the number has remained steady in recent years, Jane Harris, campaigns officer at charity Rethink, says it has been kept down by the lack of in-patient beds. If people can be compulsorily treated in the community, she argues, that could lead to a huge increase in the number of people being sectioned.

Harris says implementation of compulsory treatment varies between areas, with use of restraint and seclusion left to guidance rather than law, and not monitored.

She says many people in England do not receive treatment until they are sectioned. In Scotland people have a right to services and can access preventive treatment earlier.

Yet Wooldridge, despite all his experiences, still believes there is a place for compulsion. "Yes, I can see it's necessary at times and I can see it's necessary for me because it could be deemed I was a danger to me or others if I was left in the community," he says.

But he believes the guidelines on how compulsion is used need to be considered carefully. "People seeking help for the first time need to be reassured it will only be used once certain criteria are reached," he says. "If there's the risk that they might be compulsorily treated or sectioned purely after asking for help it may well put people off getting help."

David Crepaz-Keay, senior policy adviser on patient and public involvement at the Mental Health Foundation, also has personal experience of compulsory treatment, having been sectioned twice.


"It's a humiliating and degrading process, which is consistent with a lot of the treatment that goes on after that," he says.

Crepaz-Keay believes there is a strong case for intervening if someone is an immediate threat to their own safety or to others. But it is what follows the immediate intervention, a response that can go on for long periods, that is problematic.

And the situation will be made worse by the government's plans to remove the requirement for there to be a therapeutic benefit, he says.

Susan Jones,* 60, believes she was wrongly sectioned two years ago and presented no danger to anyone.

She fell into a deep depression after a traumatic family episode and her condition worsened over six months until, while staying in France, she suffered a breakdown and was taken to a local hospital.

Jones praises the hospital and says she felt well enough after five weeks to return with her husband to Britain, where she checked into a private clinic. But once there she was given anti-psychotic drugs, without her knowledge, and became ill.

Her husband had her put back on mood-stabilising drugs and she started to feel better and expected to go home. But a psychiatrist decided she needed tranquillisers and when she refused he had her sectioned.

Jones says: "I said 'you can't do this to me'. He said 'well I've done it'. I tried to leave the hospital but they forcibly put me back in my room, putting a nurse at my door. I was furious but there was nothing I could do about it."

Jones managed to escape the clinic and was about to board a flight back to France when she was arrested, handcuffed and returned to the hospital. She says the tribunal appeal to lift her section was refused on the grounds that she would try to go back to France, justification Jones finds difficult to understand.

When her private funding ran out she was transferred to a mixed NHS ward, where she says she was sexually assaulted by other patients and had all her belongings stolen. After two months she was discharged and returned home. But then she had a row with her husband, in which she says she was assaulted. He told police she had threatened to kill him and burn down the house.

Jones was sectioned for a second time and was kept in hospital, this time for six months. She says she was given no treatment in hospital, only drugs to placate her. "I used to watch people walking in the street and was so jealous. You have no voice, no-one listens to you."

Jones accessed her case notes after she left hospital and found a psychiatrist's report that she had post-traumatic stress disorder and there was no benefit in continuing to incarcerate her. But she says the report was not used in her tribunal hearings or shown to her family.

"I endured hell, absolute hell, there are no other words to describe it," she says. "Compulsory treatment has a place but compulsory treatment must be very carefully acted upon by experts.

"Surely compulsory treatment is only necessary if somebody presents a danger. I was sectioned on my husband's word, I had no examination. How dare they?"

* Not her real name