A small minority of people who suffer from acute mental illness pose a threat to society. The overwhelming majority pose a threat only to themselves. All are equally deserving of compassionate treatment, but most are being failed by the National Health Service.

That is no fault of the professionals involved, who are struggling to deal with a mental illness epidemic and a system in crisis. Budgets have been cut. Staff are overwhelmed. The Observer was given unprecedented access to one of Britain's leading psychiatric units and found that, even in a flagship facility, there are wards on the brink of chaos.

For want of treatment, or even diagnosis, tens of thousands of people with mental health problems end up neither in community care nor in hospital, but in prison or homeless.

That is a reflection of the way chronic mental illness is still persistently stigmatised in British society. The government has made it clear that its priority is protecting the public from violent individuals presumed to be marauding in society. That is the message from the Mental Health Bill, which returns to Parliament next week. It aims to strengthen existing powers to 'section' patients - detaining them on wards - and give doctors new authority to force patients to take their medication. The bill has been rejected once already by the Lords as too great an infringement of individual liberty.

Enforced medication and detention can be necessary in some cases. But if the ward on which the patient is kept is a terrifying, disorderly place; if there is no bed for the patient on that ward and no community psychiatric nurse to help follow up the hospital treatment, the initial intervention will be for nought. 'Sectioning' a patient need not always be seen as draconian. It can be the first step to therapeutic treatment. Given the paucity of in-patient care in Britain, it too often ends up being downright punitive.

The government is not wrong in wanting to give doctors new powers. But by implying, as it does with the Mental Health Bill, that mental illness is more a matter of public safety than of public health it is wrong-headed. And by asking health workers to take greater responsibility for patients and yet systematically undermining their ability to do so by closing wards and cutting budgets, it is not only wrong, it is cynical and hypocritical.