At least 30 dangerous mental health patients secretly freed from high security hospitals have gone on to kill in recent years, The Telegraph can disclose.
Around 250 violent offenders are detained in institutions such as Broadmoor, Rampton and Ashworth each year after courts decide they are too mentally ill to go to prison
Many, like the Nottingham killer, Valdo Calocane, are told their conditions are so acute they are unlikely to ever be freed.
But figures obtained by the Telegraph reveal that an astonishing 55 percent of those sent to secure hospitals are quietly freed within five years, almost 90 per cent within ten years and 99 percent within 20-years.
It’s not “too ill to go to prison”. It’s “too ill to be responsible for their actions”.
And if they are cured of their illness then they should be released, of course. Because they were not responsible when they acted as they did so they should not be punished.
Now, there’s an awful lot that can slip through there – claiming mental illness when it’s mere evil and so on. But the UK rules on being able to claim that illness are, as far as I know, pretty strict. That clearly mad nutter of a Welsh choirboy hasn’t been able to claim it after all.
It’s also true that the white coats might claim a cure when it hasn;t happened, or people stop taking their drugs and so on. But the base idea, that nutters aren’t responsbile so once they’re not nutters they walk is a cornerstone of the base legal system.
So, err, just one of those difficult ones, right?
Has anyone ever actually been cured of a mental illness?
According to Theodore Dalrymple he has a thyroid deficiency that is controllable with modern medicine but would in the past have sent him to an asylum.
Hypothyroidism, the absence of thyroid hormone in the blood due to an under-performing or non-existent thyroid gland.
Leads to cretinism – an actual medical condition.
I know a bloke who was shot in the throat and survived but was left with a destroyed thyroid gland.
Has to take thyroxine tablets every day, known to his mates as his ACPs (anti cretin pills).
People overcome mental injuries all the time.
“Cured” is a big word tho. Doctors aren’t good at curing mental illnesses, only at handing out pills. Psychiatry is a soapy titwank without a happy ending. Why do you think Tony Soprano’s therapist quit on him in the TV show? Irl she’d still be billing him for fortnightly appointments, 20 years later. Assuming he didn’t get whacked by Phil Leotardo.
So, the good news is people can get better, depending on the severity of the illness, time, circumstances. The bad news is, nobody can make them get better, there’s no predictable timeline like with a broken bone, and medicine aims for the more realistic goal of hopefully making you just miserable enough to function in society instead of curl into a ball and cry.
For very serious mental health problems, clinical depression, PTSD, psychotic breaks, schizophrenia… no, being “cured” is not a realistic goal. It’s a stretch goal. Best we can do for those people is help them manage the symptoms and hope for the best. Much of the soapy titwank of psychiatric care is just about gently letting the patient come to the realisation there’s no “cure”, this is something they’ll have to take one day at a time for the rest of their lives.
Has anyone ever actually been cured of a mental illness?
Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex fame tells a story about a woman who was obsessed with the belief that she has left her hair dryer on at home.
The TL:DR version:
She’s a senior lawyer and very well paid but the obsession is ruining her life because she keeps getting to work, obsessing about the hairdryer and turning back to check it’s been turned off.
She tries therapy and even time in an institution and goes to see some of the USA’s top psychiatrists but nobody can help her. The profession is puzzled.
One day a young psychiatrist asks her how many hairdos she has? One, is the response.
Well, says the young whipper snapper, why don’t you put it in your handbag (purse as the Americans would say) and take it to work with you and every time you worry just have a look inside your handbag.
Bingo, she gets her life back, but is she cured?
Apparently half the profession was offended that she wasn’t cured and there was a big row, but as Scott argued the whole point is to get her life back to as close as normal as possible.
The actual problem being that of being able to function, or work. We IT types sort this out all the time with workarounds, and many of us are proud of our lateral creativity in doing so. The nerdy shit of diagnosing the actual problem and fixing it is often just preening, using a rifle when a shotgun will do.
One of the Times commenters wrote about her very similar condition today, though in her case it was (heated) hair straighteners.
I don’t read the Times so didn’t see it. Ss
Ever since we bought our first motorhome I’ve always had an irrational anxiety about dropping the cap from the chemical toilet in to the toilet. Some of them are quite large and it would be gone.
When I first heard the hair dryer story it dawned on me how to fix the problem. I bought a spare cap and keep it in a safe place on the van.
The only way really is to go Science Fiction on them and implant something in their heads.
It would be a bit like Gan in Blakes7.
If I might suggest a different sci-fi source, 1991’s ‘Wedlock’ with Rutger Hauer has a neat alternative.
Thanks. I’ve been trying to remember the name of that film.
I don’t know about Gan and Blakes7 but I understand for some of them the best cure is a lump of lead just behind the left ear approximately 9mm diameter.
Honest, transparent reviews of when diagnoses have been demonstrably wrong, perhaps?
For 2 reasons – to inform & improve future diagnoses and to hold to account those who make them.
The trouble is, like all the Public Sector, the mental health sphere is stuffed full of ‘professional’ people who think things like ‘there are no real mental illnesses’ & ‘we are all mentally ill’ etc and are suckers for any sob story going.
The simple solution would be to make the doctors making the decision to release someone personally liable for anything the patient does once outside. That might concentrate their minds a bit.
Psychiatrists are mostly liberal women but it’s a dedicated panel including a judge (lol) that decides to let violent mental patients dressed as Santa out.
In my experience, NHS psychiatrists are mostly good people, doing their best, with the equivalent of a piece of string and a bit of lightly used chewing gum as funding.
There’s just not enough mental hospitals. Like with prisons, they’re attempting to disguise the government’s irresponsible failure to provide enough infrastructure by just allowing criminals and crazies to go free.
A dad from my daughter’s primary school is an NHS psychiatrist. Card-carrying Labour (natch), insists we should have locked down earlier and harder, oblivious to its psychological effects.
If I ever went bonkers he’s the last person I’d want to talk to. If he could he’d have me lobotomised for Wrongthink. Nurse Ratched with a beard.
I think the best non-pharmaceutical thing any trick cyclist can do is offer patients a sympathetic and non-judgemental ear. That can be extremely powerful, simple human empathy in a world starved of love.
Like when you see someone fall on the street. We wouldn’t step over them, we’d help them back to their feet. Small acts of kindness are all we have to offer, most of the time. Just knowing that other people are not indifferent to their suffering can make all the difference in the world to a person.
If they can also talk you into seeing your problems in a different, more optimistic light, that’s gravy.
But yer – psychiatrists are still doctors, and doctor mileage varies between the brilliant, selfless and dedicated, the workaday journeywomen, and utter twonks who shouldn’t be allowed near a patient.
Get yourself on 4chan and view some of the China threads.
The sheer lack of humanity that the Chinese have towards one another will amaze and astound (and not in a good way).
Good job we aren’t importing 100s of thousands of them.
To a good first approximation psychiatry is bogus. Nobody can tell whether one of these detainees (is that the correct noun?) is now sane enough to be released. Until there’s some science (not, please God, The Science) behind the trick cyclists it’s hard to see an answer except keeping the killers locked up. Grim but true.
Absolutely dearieme. I’m sure the fact that the killers “were not responsible when they acted as they did so they should not be punished” is of little consolation to the relatives of the people they killed.
The test for criminal insanity has been defined in English law since 1843 (not the most permissive of times) and concerns whether the accused had a disease of the mind that prevented him from knowing his actions were wrong.
But this never used to mean they wouldn’t be punished, it meant we tried not to put insane people in normal prisons with shoplifters.
Now our prisons are full of deranged lunatics, and sometimes one will torture-murder another inmate just for shits and gigs.
But deranged lunatics used to be dealt with in a much more efficient manner.
The folk themselves would do him in, or the state would.
All this kiddie gloves, nicey nicey, softly softly approach does is keep alive dangerous animals.
Put them down. Dump in slurry pit. No fanfare, no ceremony.
It is quick, efficient and takes away the celebrity aspect. They want to be the baddest, meanest, toughest, remembered as martyrs and brave fighters.
Nobody wants to be forgotten, sinking into spend eternity in a vat of shit.
As a bonus, the taxpayer isn’t on the hook for a life time of incarceration costs and prison officers aren’t at risk of being attacked.
Can you ever not be responsible for your actions? What temporary condition would make you, against your will, murder someone? I’m no medical man but is there someone who could prove to me, as an ordinary bloke that “Mr X chopped Miss Y into little bits because of Z, which can be cured by 2 years of 342″£$%”? Because if not, then they need to be put down as you would a viscious dog…
I dimly recall reading of a case of a normal bloke who went crazy and murdered his wife. He was found to have a brain tumour, and when it was removed his behaviour returned to normal.
But I think it was Heinlein who wrote that if a psychopathic killer could be cured, they’d look back at what they’d done and commit suicide.
Not difficult at all. Just make a condition of release that the headshrinker signing off on it is personally liable – financially and criminally – for the future good conduct of the cured nutter.
Add the offender’s legal team and the judge to that list, Julia.
30 have killed “in recent years”. How many years is that; 10?
In that time 2,500 will have been sent to these secure mental health places (250 a year), and 2,250 will have been released (90%, including some releases of those who were locked away earlier).
That’s 1.3%. The reoffending rate for murderers released from prison seems to average around 3%, so the secure hospitals seem to be doing a better job than the courts/prison service/parole board:
https://qna.files.parliament.uk/qna-attachments/1713645/original/2024-04-29%20PQ%2023616%2023617%20table.xlsx
That suggests to me that the main problem isn’t releasing lots of nutters, but allowing people who aren’t really nutters to avoid prison.
“That suggests to me that the main problem isn’t releasing lots of nutters, but allowing people who aren’t really nutters to avoid prison.”
I would apply Occam’s Razor and simplify that intoç
“That suggests to me that the main problem
isn’t releasing lots of nutters, butis allowing people who commit crimesaren’t really nuttersto avoid prison.”That clearly mad nutter of a Welsh choirboy hasn’t been able to claim it after all.
That’s because he wasn’t nuts. He was just evil and should have been shot and unceremoniously dumped in the nearest slurry pit.
I mean his dad literally told the recent inquiry that he hated white people…
The problem is . . . governments are instituted amongst Men for mutual protection.
Modern, read decadent, government sees its role as protecting the perps, not the victims, which is failure in their prime reason for even existing.