Published before February 2009
“Knife nut in killer rampage.” “Mentally ill killer not watched.” “Psycho crackdown chaos.”
These are just three tabloid headlines from the last few years that have made the Mental Health Alliance’s campaign for better mental health legislation in England and Wales a challenging one.
“The campaign we’ve been waging has, in the mass media at least, been counter intuitive,” says Andy Bell, Chair of the Alliance, which is made up of 77 organisations, mostly mental health charities.
A balanced Bill
“All the pressure in the media, after some very high profile tragedies, has been for locking people up. So our message for a Mental Health Bill that has a balance between human rights and public protection has been going against the grain.”
Despite this, the Alliance has been extremely successful. Set up in 1999, its members, organisations like Mind, Rethink and Age Concern England, have worked together to defeat two “unworkable” and “unethical” draft Mental Health Bills.
And thanks to some savvy media and campaigning work, the Alliance helped make significant amendments to the latest Mental Health Bill, published in November 2006 and currently going through its final stages in Parliament.
These amendments include, giving patients access to a mental health advocate when they are detained.
Alliance communications set up
The Alliance operates by using the time of its representatives from member organisations. There’s no Alliance press officer. A Campaigns Group, made up of parliamentary officers, campaigns and press staff from member organisations, meet six times a year. The Media Group, an email-based team of press officers, has also enabled the Alliance to respond to events and push Alliance messages in the media. Together these groups agreed on the language the Alliance would use in its campaigning work and this is something Bell thinks has been crucial to the communications strategy.
Language of the campaign
“Our members agreed to stay away from hysterical language,” says Bell. “We could have been much more forthright in our opposition to the Bill by saying that the government proposals actually made the public less safe, but we’ve avoided overstatement.”
Instead, Bell says all Alliance spokespeople ensured that they talked to the media in the more honest language of Alliance policy. They did not avoid speaking about homicide and violence, but made it clear that a Mental Health Bill advocated by the Alliance could promote human rights and public safety at the same time.
“If we avoided these subjects we would have been laughed at,” says Bell.
Giving service users a voice
One of the major aims of the campaign was to get people with mental health needs and their families involved; to give them a platform to talk about their experiences of the Act. Bell says member mental health organisations knew their service users had a very strong online presence, so the Alliance website (www.mentalhealthalliance.org.uk) was an important campaigning tool. There, people with mental health needs can find out about Alliance rallies, petitions and policy issues so they can write to their MP.
“We had a letter writing campaign recently but we didn’t provide a template because we wanted people to express their own views about what the Act means to their lives,” says Bell.
Concrete outcome
Alliance members are pleased with the outcome of the campaign - a Bill which should be law next Autumn. Bell says the Bill is flawed in many ways but it’s a good deal better than what was initially published.
“Maybe if we’d used hysterical language we’d have had a higher profile, we don’t know,” says Bell. “But it’s good we avoided the temptation to do that.”
See sample Mental Health Alliance press releases at www.mentalhealthalliance.org.uk