The Mental Capacity Act and Me

October is something of a reflective month for me. It's the time when I cut back the trees and bushes in the garden, tie up the branches and take them to the dump. I clear out all the rubbish that's gathered in the house. I get things mended, get the boiler checked and batten down the hatches for winter. And it's the time when I also look back at what has happened and assess where I've been going, and more importantly, where I'm going to end up.

This October has been more thoughtful than usual. It's now four years since the Mental Capacity Act was passed and the case of Kerrie Wooltorton has brought it to the fore. The MCA was a bill with significance for me, because it was the first time that I got seriously involved in politics. It changed my life and changed me. Although I had already looked after my mum for some time before this bill started its journey through Parliament in 2002, this was the point that I actually truly became a carer, because it was the point when I started to really care.

One of the advantages (if you can call it that) of looking after someone vulnerable for so long, is that you see the system as it actually is. Most peoples' experience of tertiary care is mercifully short; it will be a few weeks or months at the end of a relatives' life. That means that they don't get to know how it works and what the dangers are in that system. And that explains the total chasm in understanding between them and someone like myself, who has had to deal with it for twelve years. That is why, when I saw the mental incapacity bill, I nearly went off my head and other people could not see the danger. And that is why, four years from it being passed, we are sitting saying 'What happened? We didn't mean it to work like this!'

In the next few posts, I'm going to explain what went wrong and how we got there.