The Court of Appeal has ruled that the Mental Health Tribunal failed to give adequate reasons when it affirmed a six-month renewal order for the involuntary detention of a man identified as F.C. The court allowed his appeal and declared that the decision breached the tribunal’s statutory duty to give reasons.
The judgment, delivered by Ms Justice Ní Raifeartaigh on 15 December 2022, concerned the tribunal’s decision of 12 February 2021. F.C. had been detained for nearly two years at that point. His consultant psychiatrist had made a renewal order on 25 January 2021, and the tribunal affirmed it after a remote hearing. One tribunal member dissented and favoured revoking the order.
The court said the key disputed issue was F.C.’s insight into his condition and whether he would take medication if released. Medical reports before the tribunal described his history of schizophrenia, stopping medication and relapses. F.C. told the tribunal that he would take medication in the community. The majority decision recorded the clinicians’ view that he lacked insight, then affirmed the renewal order under the statutory mental-disorder criteria. It did not refer to his evidence or explain whether, or why, it rejected it.
The tribunal argued that its reasoning could be inferred from the medical evidence and the decision record read in context. The Court of Appeal rejected that as insufficient. It held that the tribunal should have acknowledged F.C.’s evidence on the central issue and indicated why it preferred the psychiatrists’ evidence. The dissent on that same issue made the majority’s silence harder to explain. The court said a short, explicit explanation would have been enough.
The court also addressed mootness after F.C. was discharged from hospital on 4 August 2021. It accepted that his request to quash the decision had become moot, but decided to hear the appeal because the remaining claims concerned liberty and other fundamental rights, and similar detention issues might arise for him again.
The declaration was confined to how the tribunal expressed its reasons. The court did not decide that the underlying detention decision was substantively wrong. It did not determine damages: it directed F.C. to say within 21 days whether he wished to pursue that claim. The judgment also stated a provisional view that he should receive the costs of the appeal if no further decision was required, subject to the respondent’s right to apply about costs within 14 days.