Nobody's commented on the ethics of THREATENING a person with the Mental Health Act. It's just that kind of behaviour that reinforces the public view that psychiatry is nothing but a paternalistic, power-hungry, and abusive organisation which serves to use its powers of legal detention as some form of punishment or torture to the defenceless mentally ill in society. Of course, that's bollocks, but if you go round using the MHA as a bullying tactic that's the message you're sending out. From the sounds of it, your threat was pretty empty anyway, as I would very much doubt that a MHA assessment would find her detainable. Which means you've also threatened something which could probably not have even legally been carried out. I appreciate that you are not in a position yourself, despite your experience of situations like this, to carry out a psychiatric assessment to determine whether or not arranging a Mental Health Act assessment was necessary, but I do not believe that threatening somebody with the MHA is ever acceptable, particularly when there are little grounds for doing so, ie, she was almost certainly not detainable*. It is, I fully accept, very difficult to know what to do in this situation, and there are no easy answers. I don't know what the policy is of the LAS, and whether you would be "allowed" to leave a person like this without calling in the shrinks and coppers. But I will say again, the MHA is not a weapon; sectioning is not a punishment. Please don't think of it as such. *Not having seen her, I cannot, of course, know this for certain. I am assuming, based on what you have written.