'Care in the community' for people with serious mental illnesses has had a deadly price – Tom Wood
The closure of large numbers of secure mental health hospitals in the 1980s was a serious mistake
Far be it for me to add to the idle speculation about the brutal murder of former politician Ann Widdecombe, but if I were a betting man I would venture a few shillings on ‘mental illness’ being a factor when we eventually find out the background of the individual responsible.
It would be a pretty safe bet, for poor mental health in such incidents is a recurring theme. A scan of recent extreme incidents shows a fair representation of poorly diagnosed or inadequately managed mental illness.
Now, before the statisticians start calling, I appreciate that across the span of all homicides, the instance of mental illness is statistically insignificant. But given that most murders are in a domestic setting, this is seriously skewed. If you look at random stranger attacks with multiple casualties, you will find a very different picture. Two recent cases provide a valuable insight.
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Dangerous people, inadequately managed
Valdo Calocane, who killed three people, Barnaby Webber, Grace O'Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates, in random incidents in Nottingham in June 2023, had an extensive history of violence and mental health disturbance and had been detained at various times, but had managed to slip away from his supervision to carry out his dreadful crimes.
Axel Rudakubana was the young man who attacked a children’s dance class in Southport in July 2024, killing three young girls and injuring several others. He too had a history of violent and concerning behaviour, leading to his referral to the Home Office’s anti-extremist programme ‘Prevent’. Despite his obviously disturbed state, insufficient action was taken to prevent his deadly intentions from being carried out.
There are other examples and I could go on, but you probably get the drift. In each case, we had a dangerous individual who was identified but inadequately managed by the authorities. And innocent people paid the ultimate price for that failure.
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A laudable idea
This is not a simple problem to fix. We are constantly being told that poor mental health is putting our health services under extreme pressure. Long waiting times for treatment, especially for young people, seem to bear this out.
But the failure to care for and manage our most seriously disturbed offenders is a deeper problem and the roots go back to a serious misstep in the 1980s. ‘Care in the community’ was a laudable idea at the time, but there were serious unintended consequences.
To deinstitutionalise the treatment and care of mentally disturbed folk was a worthy goal. In fact, it led to the wholesale closure of secure mental health hospitals.
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As a result, we simply do not have sufficient secure places to keep all those who present a risk to themselves and to others. More and more seriously disturbed people are on our streets and our police and blue-light services are required to deal with them every day.
Until we build back some of the capacity we have lost since the 1980s, this problem, and the associated dangers it has created, will persist.
Tom Wood is a writer and former police officer