Professor Brendan Kelly has given us three books for the price of one. In the Preface and Chapter 1 we get a brilliant, crystal-clear overview of the international legislation that has driven mental health law since the Second World War. The alphabet soup of all the various conventions (the UDHR, ECHR, CRPD and more) is clarified for us, with their key features and differences laid out and explained. In Chapters 2–5 he presents the key features of the mental health legislations that clinicians need to understand. He does this in a separate chapter for each of the three UK jurisdictions (England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) and also for Ireland. These chapters chart how each of these jurisdictions has followed its own individual route to protect the human rights of people with mental illness. What are essentially universal and timeless challenges have been approached using the same basic set of tools but with different priorities. One jurisdiction emphasises advance statements, another advocacy, one emphasises best interests, another is concerned more with risk, whereas another attempts to integrate mental health law entirely with capacity legislation. Last, in Chapters 6 and 7 we are lifted from the mechanics of mental health legislation to consider the broader social context in which the positive human rights of the mentally ill are so clearly compromised and neglected. Why, despite all the rhetoric, is this group of individuals still denied a voice and social inclusion?

Readers will get more from this book than perhaps they expect. Presumably, the most thumbed pages will be your local legislation. Kelly's style of tracing the changes across the reviews and amendments of the individual Acts makes sense of how each jurisdiction has come to its current set of principles and practices. It also highlights those things we have probably become aware of in our peripheral vision. How many of us registered, for instance, that the Mental Health Act 1983 gave mental health review tribunals powers beyond simply upholding or discharging sections? I thought they had just drifted into doing it more and more and we had gone along with it.

How important, in reality, are these differences in emphasis between the jurisdictions?