Community Treatment Orders on trial: the OCTET RCT

Background/Objectives: Deinstitutionalisation of mental health services has led to increased focus on compulsory treatment outside of hospitals. Despite a lack of evidence for their efficacy and a long standing, heated debate about surrounding ethical and clinical issues, Community Treatment Orders (CTOs), which allow for psychiatric patients to be treated under compulsion in the community, were introduced by the 2007 amendments to the Mental Health Act in England and Wales. The OCTET RCT was designed to test the new provision against existing options for supervising patients in the community. In this paper we r…