Black Mental Health: Tonight's BEN TV 'women's hour' show highlights social injustices in mental health care

This issue of mental healthcare provision within African Caribbean communities is being given centre stage this week as the subject of BEN TV's women's hour, aired live tonight from 9.30 – 10.30pm on Sky Channel 194.

In a month that has seen shocking revelations of squalid conditions of vermin, violence, overcrowding and drug dealing on mental health wards across the country, Women's Hour host Janet Narh discussion will touch this and how the spiralling death toll of patients detained under the Act can be addressed.

The channel, decision to round of this month with a look at this issue, brings black mental health in from the margins of the debate around equitable access to good healthcare to addressing the issue of social justice and race equality that lie at the heart of the widespread failings of the service.

Reaching the heart of Black communities both in the UK and abroad, BEN TV's decision to focus on this issue will bring the plight of many locked up on psychiatric wards across the UK to an international audience.

Experts will also examine the adverse implications that the introduction of the new 2007 Mental Health Act is likely to have on black patients who are already overrepresented within psychiatric care.

Matilda MacAttram, director of Black Mental Health UK will be speaking about the silent crisis, which touches the lives of every black family in Briton.

The shocking revelation of the evidence crisis in antidepressants medication revealed this week will also be addressed as experts will debate how this latest revelation impact on black patients who are rarely offered any choice other than medication.

Host Janet Narh will be speaking to guests, Chinyere Inyama A Mental Health Review Tribunal President and Mental Health Lawyer, Matilda MacAttram Black Mental Health UK director and journalist and Caroline Ojar a clinical psychotherapist and advisor for Diverse Minds.

The debate on one of the most pressing social issues in society today runs form 9.30 – 10.30 on BEN TV, Sky digital channel 194 on Wednesday 27th February and will be repeated again next Thursday .
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Notes to the editor:

· Black Mental Health UK is a human rights campaigns group established to address the over representation of African Caribbean's within secure psychiatric care and raise awareness to address the stigma associated with mental health.

· African Caribbean's are 44% more likely to be sectioned, 29% more likely to be forcibly restrained, 50% more likely to be placed in seclusion and make up 30% of in patients on medium secure psychiatric wards despite having similar rates of mental illness as British white people.

· Data on the 300 deaths that occurred under the Mental Health Act in 2007, is published in the Forum for Preventing Deaths in Custody report was published in September 2007.

· Data on overcrowding, over medication, the culture of violence and unsanitary condition of mental health wards is published in the, Risks, Rights and Recovery, biannual report published by Mental Health Act Commission in 2008.