‘He should never have been discharged’: How Mental Health Patients Are Being Failed During Lockdown
A week after the country went into lockdown, Margaret went to collect her son Gary* from the psychiatric hospital in Portsmouth where he’d been detained under the mental health act.
The day before, a member of staff at the hospital had telephoned to say they could no longer keep him there. When she arrived, the nurse waiting with him in the car park handed over his holdall and a small carrier bag containing his medication.
The psychiatrist she’d met a few weeks earlier, when he’d first been ad
