Mental Health Review Tribunals

This paper is concerned with the operation of the Mental Health Review Tribunal system and summarizes the findings of an empirical investigation of tribunal decision making. The tribunals constitute an independent body which reviews the necessity for the continued compulsory detention of patients in psychiatric hospitals. The research focuses on the interpretation and application of mental health legislation by individual tribunal members and the manner in which these individual approaches are qualified in the group context. The study comprises three stages: a self-report questionnaire, a national statistical analysis of decisions, and a simulation study of decision making using a videotape of a hypothetical case. The research establishes considerable inconsistency in tribunal decision making at both an individual and group level and attributes some of this inconsistency to individually based factors isolated by the research. The findings further indicate that these factors remain influential within the group decision-making context.