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Ethnicity

 

Ethnicity of individuals as notified to the Commission on Mental Health Act forms 2009-10

 

AR-09-10-Table34

Our interest in this

We know that, in some parts of England, there is evidence of higher use of mental health legislation in some ethnic groups. Detention rates are higher amongst people of Black-African or Caribbean ethnicity. We are interested to see if any ethnic group is over- or under-represented in Scottish data, so that the reasons for this might be explored and addressed.

What we found

We can only report on ethnicity if it is recorded on the forms sent to us. We have information from 70% of forms, the same as last year. This is not high enough for us to be confident about our data. We have compared our figures with the most recent available census data. Since 2001, there have been several changes in the Scottish population, including a significant number of asylum seekers.

About 3% of all forms identified people from ethnic minorities, compared with 2% of the last known population ethnicity data.

The main finding is the high number of people recorded as "black African". Census data suggests that black-African people make up a relatively small proportion of Scotland's minority ethnic population.

While acknowledging the limitations of the data on which we have based our analysis, it appears that people of Black-African origin are more likely to be subject to mental health legislation. This finding should be interpreted with caution. There is missing data and there has been reception of asylum seekers since the last census. It may also be that ethnicity forms are more likelty to be filled out for black people. It is worthy of further study and we will shortly have more research data that may give more information.