[2025] UKUT 009 (AAC)

JB was admitted to psychiatric hospital on 17 April 2019 on transfer from prison, where he had been remanded in connection with allegations of multiple serious violent assaults, due to concerns about his mental state.

JB accepts that he suffers from mental disorder. He says that his mental disorder is post-traumatic stress disorder in the context of his having been drugged and raped on multiple occasions in the past, and having been abused by staff while in hospital.

The team treating him at The Spinney considered that his mental disorder was paranoid schizophrenia. Dr Al Noufoury, who was JB’s responsible clinician at the date of his hearing before the Tribunal and who has since sadly died, did not accept that the incidents of drugging, rape and abuse which JB complained of had actually happened. Rather, he considered that JB’s belief that they had occurred to be evidence that he was suffering from auditory and tactile hallucinations and paranoid delusions which were symptoms of his paranoid schizophrenia.

At the hearing before the Tribunal JB maintained that he didn’t need to remain in hospital and was ready to be discharged into the community to live with his mother. The detaining authority argued that the nature and degree of JB’s mental disorder made it appropriate for him to be liable to be detained in a hospital for medical treatment, that it was necessary for the protection of others that JB should receive such treatment, and that appropriate medical treatment was available to him at The Spinney.