Last letter to Virginia Bottomley

Springfield Patients Council Limited

1.8.93

Dear Mrs Bottomley,

Community Supervision Orders

        May I add a personal plea to the growing opposition to your proposed legislation regarding Community Supervision Orders. I trust you will recall my name, I am Carole Ingram’s brother and we exchanged correspondence at the beginning of 1992.

        You will be aware of the anger felt by users of psychiatric services at these proposals through your meetings with Peter Campbell ( Survivors Speak Out ) , Edna Conlan O.B.E. ( United Kingdom Advocacy Network ) and others. National MIND, its local associations and many other respected bodies will have impressed upon you their feeling that the existing law is perfectly adequate to deal with so-called dangerous schizophrenics wreaking mayhem while out ‘in the community’. The framework of care and control is in place, it is merely the implementation and monitoring of that framework that requires your attention.

        To me and others the CSOs represent just another sword of Damocles poised above the heads of people with mental disabilities whose rights are already atrophied. Do you wish to be remembered as the woman who drove another draconian nail into the lives of the mentally distressed ?

        St. Peter awaits at those gates – I urge you to reconsider your actions. U-turns are better than bad turns,

Yours sincerely,

Jamie Summers. (Chairman)