The continuing detention of 40-year-old Frances Joy under the Mental Health Act points to lamentable shortcomings in the way people with learning disabilities are dealt with in the district and reinforces the concerns expressed in a report from the Bradford District Care Patient and Public Involvement Forum.

Miss Joy's 77-year-old mother says that her daughter should not have been arrested and subsequently sectioned after she behaved oddly in Shipley last December because she is autistic, not mentally ill. She now, understandably, wants her daughter to be released from the psychiatric hospital and allowed to come home, with a care package to help her look after her.

If it is the cost of that care which is the stumbling block to people like Frances being properly diagnosed and treated, something is very rotten in the state of the system.

There is naturally concern if people with genuine mental illnesses are left struggling to cope in the community when they are not well enough and would be better treated in hospital. But this appears to be the other way round with Frances, an apparent victim of the misdiagnosis highlighted in the PPI forum report, being unnecessarily detained in hospital where her condition is unlikely to improve.

Her situation highlights the difficulties autistic people face, particularly as their parents grow older. They need ongoing help, not incarceration, and should not be allowed to become victims of the growing scandal of underfunding of care in the community, which promises so much but increasingly fails to deliver.