We listen to an average 1,000 callers a week on our telephone help service Saneline, two-thirds of whom are service users. Many tell us that if they had been given help when they first sought it, before they became so ill they denied their illness and refused voluntary treatment, there would have been less need for compulsion and all the misery it can bring.Despite the fashionable rhetoric of choice and diversity there is still no option to have humane inpatient care, time for rehabilitation, or a place of asylum when stresses are intolerable, let alone consistent and reliable care in the community. Mental health law should be designed to prevent a person deteriorating to the point where they have to be detained against their will, and to protect them from neglect and suicide. Any increased compulsion should be on the services to fulfil their duty of care.The concept of compulsory treatment orders for people living in the community has been one of the Bill’s red rags. There was genuine alarm that people who did not need or want medication would endure kitchen-table jabs and be left to get on with the often devastating side-effects of powerful medication. Sane is firmly opposed to anyone being forced to take medication outside a hospital or other clinical setting.There were things in the Bill that might have made a difference to the outcome of some of the headline cases that propelled the reforms in the first place. After seeing 43 psychiatrists in four years Christopher Clunis was discharged into the community, where the follow-up was pathetic.

Unlike Michael Stone, he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia which responded well to medication. The Bill would have given Clunis the right to a care plan, and put the onus on the health and social services to ensure that he took his medicine or was returned to hospital. Had this happened he might not have deteriorated over the crucial weeks before he killed Jonathan Zito.There are important proposals I would like to see included. Families and carers should have legal rights to reflect their status. They should no longer be fobbed off by issues of confidentiality when lack of information jeopardises not only their own health but that of the person they look after.

If a person with mental illness is to be given the right to an advocate representing their interests, then so, in some circumstances, should their carer. We also believe victims and their families should have the right to information when a person who has perpetrated a crime against them is, for example, being discharged.The third important element is to ensure that people are given the right to advance directives, so that if they reach a state in which they are considered unable to make a rational decision they have chosen, in advance, what treatment they would accept.The chance to revise the Bill gives us a rich opportunity to resolve the many different agendas and produce a more workable set of guidelines. But the truth is that no new laws can make up for the horrendous undernourishment of medical and social services in this stigmatised field. Neither can legislation change how people carry out their jobs, as in the recent case where two care workers were apparently so reluctant to invade the privacy of a patient that they didn’t realise she was already dead. It can, however, provide an enlightened framework that enables people with serious mental illness to receive better-quality care and treatment; and for those around them to be able to intervene more effectively, before an unnecessary tragedy occurs.Marjorie Wallace is the founder and chief executive of Sane, the mental health charity. Saneline is open from noon to 2am every day of the year on 0845 7678000.Reader supportOur campaign has struck a chord with readers, who responded with an unprecedented number of letters and emails.

Some of the most affecting were from patients and their carers. Leslie Smith, a resident of Broadmoor, described it as “an insular and closed institution where patients have little or no say in the conduct of their quality of life. Psychological input is subordinate to a regime of compulsory drugging and a locked door. A dismal future for us all”.Liz Main from London was once detained under mental health laws.