Letter to the Editor: James Davies of Borth describes, with forensic precision the limitations of community mental healthcare that contributed to the killing of Lewis Stone by David Fleet, who was suffering from schizophrenia (Letters, Cambrian News, 5 October). Mental health has been the Cinderella of the NHS all my life, and its relentless lack of funding inevitably impacts upon the quality of care.

My daughter is involved in a custody dispute, and I have been witness to a similar example of funding constraints in the family court system, exacerbated by the secrecy of that court.

It is said that “Time is money”, and that is particularly true in law. Unfortunately, establishing the truth can be very time consuming, and assumptions are made by the court that do not serve justice well, especially when mental health is a factor.

The widespread reduction in legal aid has resulted in legions of self litigants flooding the courts, struggling to navigate court procedure and compounded by the secrecy of the family court. To be advised to seek legal advice in such circumstances, at an hourly rate well in excess of the state pension and too often for dubious counsel is, to put it mildly, exasperating.

The President of the Family Court, Sir Andrew McFarlane, is a staunch advocate of more transparency in the family court, and I commend the moral integrity of his endeavours.

The legal profession too often prefers to retain its trump cards, and I am reminded of that blind spot in Masonic reasoning, the inability to accept that secrecy is fatal to just conduct. Justice should be seen to be done.

The scriptures say that in the last days there will be a ‘form of madness upon the land’, and sadly the statistics keep going the wrong way, fuelled by an economic system that has entrenched inequality, and is increasingly politically corrupt. I would suggest that the common, social response is traumatic stress, an inability to withstand some of life’s pressures.

It is currently rife in the NHS, the military and emergency services, and in WWI brave men were shot at dawn because of it. My daughter suffered from it due to severe bullying at school, but has made great progress because of a supportive and loving partner.

However, the secrecy of the family court has rendered me virtually impotent, in that I am not allowed to access the court file to identify and rebut the many allegations that have left her separated from her young daughter for two and a half years. The most damaging allegation relates to a 111 incident that reads like ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’.

My daughter phoned her doctor but then found herself on 111, answering questions that the operator said he had to ask, and I have since discovered are directed by an algorithm.

He concluded she might have meningitis, and ignoring her protests, he ordered an ambulance, whereupon the medics ignored my daughter’s reluctance to allow them entry to her home, tried to take a blood sample, and then forced her and her two girls into the ambulance, taking them to hospital.

There, deeply distressed, she would have been given medication had I not arrived and advised her to refuse it.

A day or two later, she was assessed in her home by a psychiatrist, found to be of perfectly sound mind, but the grim fact is that she was facing sectioning because of the stress caused by an unwarranted assumption of that 111 operator — incidentally paid the minimum wage and many without medical qualifications.

The S47 report that Cafcass referenced was a travesty of the incident, with no mention of the facts I describe and the concluding remark of the judge to my daughter was: “You must address your mental problems”. That is a remark that must surely have been influenced by the report and illustrates why the access order was so draconian, two meetings a month at non-domestic locations,

Editor’s note: The Cambrian News does not, as a general rule, run Letters to the Editor without names and home town. In this

instance, given the sensitive nature of the topic, this requirement would not be in the readers’ interest.