The involuntary admission and treatment of children and adolescents under the Mental Health Act

The objectives of this analysis will be to gain a greater understanding of the numbers of people being detained over a 5 year period as a percentage of all those referred to SLaM child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) and as a proportion of those admitted to inpatient units. It will also enable clarification of the demographics (age, gender, ethnicity, social economic status) of those young people being detained so we can start to understand how to identify those most at risk of involuntary detention. It will also allow us to start to look at the outcomes of young people who have been detained (in terms of length of admissions, medication use and possibly also readmission rates) in comparison with young people who have been admitted to psychiatric hospital voluntarily.