1 Person A Week Killed By Mentally ill

The tragic scale of failures in the mental health system is to be revealed in a new report showing that one person a week in Britain is killed by a psychiatric patient who has been assessed as being low risk, often only days before. A culture of ‘desensitisation’, in which psychiatric staff become used to dealing with very high-risk patients and so fail to notice the warning signs when one is becoming dangerously ill, lies at the heart of the problem, according to the results of the independent inquiry chaired by the mental health ‘tsar’, Professor Louis Appleby.

The victim of the mentally ill patient is nearly always a family member.

Researchers looked at all the homicides and suicides involving people with mental illness over a five-year period and found that around 52 homicides a year were perpetrated by people who were supposed to be receiving care in the community. Ten per cent of the victims were strangers, the rest being friends, carers or family members.

Analysis of the cases shows that nearly all the patients, who were seen by mental health workers in the days leading up to the killing, were categorised as ‘low risk’, placing a huge question mark over why staff are failing to identify the dangers.

A much greater death toll was due to suicides, with 25 mentally ill people a week taking their own lives. Some 1,300 mental health patients a year committed suicide with the inquiry finding that far too few receive enhanced support after they left hospital.

Mental health campaigners said the report confirmed that staff were ignoring warnings and pleas for help from families in favour of assuming that patients were able to cope. ‘In order to respect the human rights of a patient, it seems you become cold to the pleas and warnings of families that they may be deteriorating and not taking medication,’ said Marjorie Wallace, founder of the charity Sane. ‘Inquiry after inquiry has shown that a family’s calls for help are ignored by staff until it is too late.’

The report, entitled Avoidable Deaths, concluded that staff were failing to identify patients who were most at risk of killing themselves or someone else.

Professor Appleby said it was not simply a question of too few resources. ‘This is really to do with how mental health staff rate a person as low or high risk. Sometimes they just become desensitised to the risks they are dealing with,’ he said.

He said it was worrying that more patients were not being offered intensive community support, known as the enhanced care programme approach, which would ensure they stay on medication and keep well. Often patients have a turbulent history which should be taken into account. The recent case of paranoid schizophrenic John Barrett who murdered retired banker Denis Finnegan in London’s Richmond Park, exposed significant failure of the risk-management process . An inquiry last month found that Barrett had a history of violence, that communication between his carers was poor and that he was allowed out on leave without having been properly assessed.

The new figures, which cover England and Wales, also show that an increasing number of killings involved patients with a ‘dual diagnosis’, where they had both a mental illness and a drug or alcohol addiction. The actual rate of homicides has not risen since the last such inquiry was carried out in the 1990s, but nor has it gone down, despite concerted efforts to offer more tailored support for schizophrenics and others after they leave hospital.