Health Minister Chris Fearne intervened in parliament last week while presenting the proposed bill that is currently taking the country by storm.

While the bill is reportedly intended to protect doctors who need to make life-and-death decisions on pregnant women, the minister was quoted as declining to restrict the law to ‘physical’ complications, and furthermore saying that mental complications could be serious too.

Knowingly or not, the minister has put his finger on one of the greatest issues plaguing those of us who work in mental health, suffer from mental illness, or care for a person with a mental disorder: there is a huge need for concrete and deliberate steps to be taken by authorities to ensure that mental health should always be considered on par with, and as an inextricable part of health.

We need to reach the point where we no longer need to specify what we mean by health; we have one body, and we need to look after all of it to the same standard.

Thus, as a psychiatrist, it is deeply disturbing for me to have to hear discussions about the distinction between physical and mental issues when approaching any patient.

It is also extremely distressing to realise that the Deputy Prime Minister and the Prime Minister, despite having been made amply aware they are proposing a situation where this is exactly what is going to happen, are persisting in creating this very duality.

In fact, the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister are going further: not only are they coolly presiding over a debate about mental versus physical health, but even though they have been alerted they are saddling psychiatry with the unrequested and unwanted role of being an exception, they are apparently unable to recognise that this is harming our profession and by extension a large segment of our population.

I find it terribly disappointing that yet another grey area is being intentionally crafted in Malta, where the people who should really know better are creating a backdoor channel while washing their hands of the process

By now, the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister cannot be unaware of the fact that they are creating a psychiatrist-shaped loophole in the law.

But this is not acceptable. The harm they are sowing is not limited to the current debate or the provision or otherwise of abortion. I am personally neither pro-choice nor pro-life; I am pro-psychiatry. And by making psychiatry exceptional, and in such a deeply divisive and emotional context, the government is taking us ever further from our goal of achieving parity between mental and general health.

It does not help, either, that by placing psychiatrists in the position of being the de facto determinants of abortion by stealth, they are creating a huge rupture both within the medical community, and the psychiatric community itself. And for what reason?

If they want to introduce abortion, cannot the government at least have the gumption to say so? I find it terribly disappointing that yet another grey area is being intentionally crafted in Malta, where the people who should really know better are creating a backdoor channel while washing their hands of the process.

It is my belief that the grey should be eliminated by the law as far as possible. It is equally my belief that there should not be any legal distinction between mental and general health; this is why it is my preference that the law - which does need to be bolstered to protect doctors who are working to save lives - should clearly identify the criterion which would allow termination of pregnancy.

As I understand it, the realistic threat of imminent death to the mother from her pregnancy is that criterion. And to my mind, this standard will need to be met by any condition for merit consideration of termination, be it ophthalmic, cardiac, gynecological or psychiatric.

Several of my colleagues do not favour this approach, pointing out that psychiatric conditions that threaten a pregnant woman’s life do not really come to mind. And in fact, in over 20 years of practising psychiatry, I have never myself once seen such a case.

But my preference is for clarity and parity: I believe that the government should be clear about its intentions and about the standards required for medically-necessary termination. Then it should let doctors get on with our job.

Etienne Muscat is a consultant psychiatrist and founding president of the Maltese Association of Psychiatry