By Daniel Keane
The Supreme Court has upheld the detention of Clive Gooden at St. Otteran’s Psychiatric Hospital in Waterford after ruling that hospital authorities could lawfully convert his status from voluntary to involuntary patient before his 72-hour discharge notice expired.
Gooden had been admitted voluntarily to hospital in November 2000 after Gardaí brought him for psychiatric assessment. He subsequently gave written notice under the Mental Treatment Act 1945 that he wished to leave.
Doctors considered him seriously ill and not fit for discharge. Before the 72-hour period expired, an application was made under section 184 of the 1945 Act and a reception order was completed, allowing his continued detention as a temporary chargeable patient.
Gooden challenged that detention through Article 40 of the Constitution, the procedure used to test whether a person is being lawfully deprived of liberty. The High Court rejected his application and he appealed to the Supreme Court.
Mrs Justice McGuinness held that section 194, which gives voluntary patients a right to leave after 72 hours’ notice, could not sensibly be read as preventing a hospital from invoking the statutory involuntary-admission process during that period. Reading the legislation as a whole, including section 195, the court found that a reception order could lawfully be obtained for a voluntary patient who was too ill to be safely discharged.
The court also rejected a challenge to the involvement of senior community welfare officer Bernard Tyers in making the application. It held that section 184 allowed an application by another suitable person where no relative was available.
A further argument concerned the right to request an independent second medical opinion. The court accepted that this was an important protection but held, reluctantly, that the wording of the 1953 Act confined that right to people being physically taken and conveyed to a mental hospital from elsewhere. It therefore did not apply to Gooden, who was already in the institution.
The appeal was dismissed. The court nevertheless criticised the outdated statutory scheme and highlighted the unequal protections then afforded to public and private psychiatric patients.