Yaa Foriwaa Appiah & Anor v Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

For false imprisonment arising from detention under the Mental Health Act 1983, the detaining defendant bears the burden of proving lawful authority. A patient may be detained under section 3 on the basis of a properly reasoned working diagnosis of mental disorder; a settled, definitive, DSM or ICD diagnosis is not required. Sections 2 and 3 provide alternative routes, and section 5(2) permits detention for up to, rather than mandating, 72 hours. Repeated practicable steps to explain tribunal rights can satisfy section 132. Involuntary medication with restraint is not automatically inhuman or degrading treatment. Lawful detention defeated the false-imprisonment and Convention claims, including the spouse’s derivative Article 8 claim.

The First Claimant was detained in NHS psychiatric hospitals under section 3 of the Mental Health Act 1983 from 26 April to 23 August 2019, following earlier detention under sections 48 and 49. A Mental Health Tribunal discharged her immediately on 23 August 2019. The claim against the Trust sought damages for false imprisonment, alleged statutory procedural breaches, treatment said to breach Articles 3, 5 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and a related Article 8 claim by the Second Claimant. The central issues were whether the initial and continuing detention was lawful, whether the statutory procedures had been followed, and whether the treatment or detention engaged additional Convention liability.

The claim was dismissed. The court found that the First Claimant’s detention was lawful throughout and that no compensable breach had been established.

1. Adjournment. The application to adjourn was refused. Applying rule 3.1(2)(b) of the Civil Procedure Rules 1998, the court treated adjournment of the fixed multi-track trial as a remedy of last resort and considered fairness, proportionality, expense, court resources, procedural history and the lack of merit in the proposed appeal.
2. Lawfulness of detention. Following R (Lumba) v SSHD [2011] UKSC 12 and R v Deputy Governor of Parkhurst Prison, Ex p Hague [1992] 1 AC 58, the claimant established imprisonment but the burden lay on the Trust to prove lawful authority. The Trust did so. Independent psychiatric assessments, contemporaneous records, treatment response and the evidence of Dr Briscoe established, on the balance of probabilities, a mental disorder requiring detention under section 3. The Tribunal’s later discharge decision addressed the position when it sat and did not determine the legality of the earlier detention or bind the High Court.
3. Statutory requirements. A settled, definitive or DSM/ICD diagnosis was unnecessary. A working diagnosis could satisfy the statutory concept of mental disorder. Sections 2 and 3 were self-contained alternative routes, so a prior section 2 application was unnecessary where the patient was already lawfully detained under sections 48 and 49. Section 5(2) authorised detention for a maximum of 72 hours, not a mandatory minimum period. The section 3 detention could therefore begin earlier. The repeated practicable efforts to explain tribunal and discharge rights satisfied section 132.
4. Convention claims. The court rejected the allegation of sustained violence during medication administration. It accepted that treatment carried out as alleged would breach Article 3, but found that the actual restraint and depot medication were necessary and proportionate. In light of lawful detention and the absence of procedural breach, the Articles 5 and 8 claims failed. The Second Claimant’s derivative Article 8 claim also failed because lawful detention did not constitute unlawful interference with family life.

Consequential orders were left for further argument after hand-down.

High Court (King's Bench Division): First-instance trial. The judgment records the First-tier Tribunal’s discharge decision and later interlocutory case-management decisions, but no appellate history of the present claim.