Black mental health inpatients more likely to be forcibly restrained by police

The number of black inpatients injured while being restrained by police in mental health units rose dramatically last year, new data shows.

The Home Office’s police use of force statistics for 2022/23, analysed by the Observer, show that police forces in England recorded 820 incidents of force used in mental health units against black inpatients, resulting in 36 injuries. This represents an increase from the 770 use of force incidents, and 27 injuries, recorded in 2021/22.

During the same period, however, the use of force incidents against inpatients who weren’t black fell from 7,698 to 6,244 – a drop of 19%. Injuries sustained as a result fell from 559 to 406.

Abena Oppong-Asare, the shadow minister for women’s health and mental health, said: “These figures reveal that the shocking racial inequalities in our mental health services are only widening.”

The data covers the first full year since the main provisions of the Mental Health Units (Use of Force) Act came into force in 2018. These provisions require mental healthcare providers to develop and publish policies on the use of restraint, keep records of the use of force, and to train staff in de-escalation techniques to help reduce its occurrence. They follow the death of a black patient, Olaseni Lewis, who died in Bethlem Royal Hospital in 2010, after being restrained by 11 police officers.

Lucy McKay, spokesperson for the charity Inquest, said that Lewis’s family had fought for this law to prevent similar deaths in future, adding: “It is clear that the law and guidance has led to some important changes, but that has not been felt by black inpatients like Seni, for whom things appear to be getting worse.”

Ground restraint and limb and body restraint rose by 9% and 20% respectively against black inpatients, the data shows, while their use against non-black inpatients fell by 38% and 14%.

Hostile environment policy led to deteriorating mental health

Black Caribbean people have also experienced deteriorating mental health as a result of the government’s hostile environment policy, which was launched in 2012, a team of researchers led by University College London has found. The policy introduced measures aimed at identifying and reducing the number of immigrants in the UK with no right to remain. Several hundred Commonwealth citizens who had settled legally in the UK since the Second World War were wrongly identified as undocumented and, in many cases, deported. People from Black Caribbean backgrounds who came to the UK after 1945, known collectively as the Windrush Generation, were particularly badly affected.

A study, published in the Lancet, of more than 50,000 people, found that the hostile environment policy, along with subsequent media coverage of the Windrush scandal, “caused people of Black Caribbean ethnicities living in the UK to experience greater psychological distress relative to the White ethnicity group.” For Black Caribbean participants born outside of the UK, mental health worsened after the Immigration Act 2014 and for those born in the UK, mental health worsened after the 2017 media coverage. The researchers did not observe effects in other minoritised ethnic groups.

“Our study shows that political policies can produce, maintain, and exacerbate systemic inequities in population mental health,” the study’s authors wrote. “We found evidence that the UK Government’s hostile environment policy and subsequent media coverage of the Windrush scandal caused people of Black Caribbean ethnicities living in the UK to experience greater psychological distress relative to the White ethnicity group, in line with our hypothesis.”

The authors also noted that the hostile environment policy “resulted in increased structural and institutional racism, whereby affected individuals lost jobs, incomes and benefits, housing, and access to public services,” adding: “There is strong evidence that these sources of social disadvantage are associated with mental ill health.”