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For three decades, it has been clear to me that governments and the public alike have made – and continue to make – a very serious error in trusting mainstream psychiatry with the emotional and mental health care of the general public.

Every year, around 46,000 people in England are subject to compulsory treatment under the Mental Health Act. Black people are around four times more likely to be ‘Sectioned’ than White people. Let’s take steps to change the law here in the UK, protecting the rights of people within the mental health care system to exercise informed consent and preserve their autonomy.

What follows is a doctor-patient interaction that I hope will become more commonplace across psychiatric outpatient clinics.

An interview with Professor Peter Kinderman about his new book, A Manifesto for Mental Health, Why We Need a Revolution in Mental Health Care, in which he proposes a rejection of invalid diagnostic labels, practical help rather than medication, and a recognition that distress is usually an understandable human response to life's challenges.

Doctors must understand and explain that drugs change the brain, and other parts of the body, in ways that we do not fully understand, that are almost always harmful to some degree, and that may be irreversible.