There is little we can do to prevent someone with a chronic mental health condition killing people. The slaughter of three little girls at a dance class in Southport in northern England. The random slaying of three people on the streets of Nottingham. The mass killing of people in a shopping mall in Sydney. They happened because mental illness unmedicated can in some cases result in violence and murder. We are better at learning from our mistakes in terms of mapping the system failings but are no better putting measures in place to safeguard against these. Sometimes it’s an email missed from police to mental health teams like in Sydney. Sometimes it’s someone not taking an episode of mental distress seriously enough. Often it’s about understaffing and under-resourcing. We are better at understanding mental illness and it’s consequences but seemingly no better at doing something about it.
I don’t want to use the names of the men responsible for killing the little girls obsessed with Taylor Swift, a couple of university friends meandering home after a night out, a delivery driver doing his deliveries, a young mother who had to throw her baby into the arms of a bystander while she was being stabbed. Quite frankly I want them to disappear into hell. The killers don’t deserve our compassion but they do deserve the forensic analysis that tells us what we can do next time to medicate a potential killer before they kill. I support the use of reasonable force when detaining someone with the capacity to hurt themselves and others and compassionate tactics to stop a fit escalating into violence but I trust a jab of sedative before a foot on the neck.
A friend told me once that we should provide wrap around social and therapeutic support for people mental illness rather than medicate. I adore idealists and encourage their view of the world but we all know there is not enough human resource in the world to adequately provide mental health services. Our only achievement in the last 100 years is convincing more people that the brain is like a car, it needs regular MOTs and that there is no shame in being mentally unwell. 50 years ago the Southport, Nottingham and Sydney stabbings would have been understood as ‘bad people doing bad things’ and we have to either hang them or lock them up. But now there’s a reason. Even Osama Bin Laden who masterminded killing 3000 people in New York in 2001, was often explained away as revenge for US crimes in the middle east. If he pulled off that same mass killing 100 years earlier, he would have been seen as a psychotic lunatic, born to be bad, motivation was not even considered. We are better at understanding context, we are better at seeing both sides of story. The information super highway, remember that? It means we receive information faster and have to weigh up the reasons. The social media algorithm threatens to remove context but it remains hungry for reason, true or not.
Enlightenment is marvelous but it’s not reducing the wide spread harm associated with mental ill health. The world around us, it seems is making us even more mentally unwell and the resource we need to make us better and reduce the harm associated, is not within our grasps.
To stop people with schizophrenia killing other people we need to do one thing, forcefully medicate. Mental health support services will never be robust enough to stop violence without this draconian backwards step.