‘I don't believe it!’ That was Victor Meldrew’s signature catchphrase.

The irascible character played by Richard Wilson in the BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave was, I concede, a past master at baffled indignation, but he was a mere tyro compared with me when I write about some of the heartbreakingly improbable tales that mental health lawyers have told me.

Some of the stuff is genuinely beyond comprehension. I can’t believe, for example, that lots of mentally ill people go to A&E at their local hospital because that’s the only way they can be sure of attracting the attention of a crisis team to look after them.

Apart from anything else, A&E is full of blood-soaked people in shock from falls or fights or alcohol. They are not in a receptive mood for the seriously mentally ill. And neither are the seriously mentally ill in a suitable frame of mind for them.

I also still can’t believe, although I’m assured that it’s true, that a patient who was previously homeless was discharged from a mental hospital with just the taxi fare to a local charity.

The charity will find you a room in a hostel, he was told. Except, after a three-hour wait, the charity told him they couldn’t help. He was given another taxi fare, this time to the town hall. We can’t help either, he was told.

And so he wandered around in the rain, somehow losing his spectacles and jacket before finding a park bench – where he slashed one wrist with a pair of scissors and had just started on the other wrist by the time the police found him and returned him to the hospital.

All of this could have been avoided with a single telephone call to the charity. Do you have a hostel place for our patient? No.

Can you believe it?

And then there was the seriously ill patient whose psychiatrist wanted him to attend the hospital three days a week for a year’s intensive therapy. And the alcoholic, bi-polar patient with psychotic episodes who wouldn’t wash herself because, she said, her mother had stolen her money and she had to have money in the house when she had a wash.

What did these two patients have in common? Some genius judged them fit to work…

I don't believe it. However, Mental Health Lawyers Association chairman Richard Charlton can believe it, which is why he is calling on the association’s membership to take local authorities and social services to court to account for their failing to adequately protect some of the most vulnerable members of their communities.

Charlton told me: ‘Councils and the NHS are seeing their budgets squeezed. Rehabilitation wards are closing and private units that can generate an income are taking their place. And things can only get worse.

‘Mental health lawyers have a critical role to play in challenging local authorities in the High Court. It is my experience that often the funding for care plans and rehabilitation is found almost at the court’s door.’

The Law Society’s mental health and disability committee chair Susan Thompson told me: ‘Even the government has acknowledged that pressure is increasing on the NHS as local authority budgets shrink. And yet the NHS is being forced to make efficiency savings, too, which creates a tension between it and local government as limited resources become available.

‘We are tracking what changes we see affecting the mental health community and the lawyers who advise them. We always welcome feedback from practitioners.’

At least someone is doing something at last – if you can believe it.