According to a Survey by one hundred familiesA charitable organization that supports and advocates families affected by mental health homicides, each year, an average of 65 people mentally massacred. Between 2018-2023, 390 mental health patients in England were engaged or suspected of guilty murder or manslaughter.
The results come after a independent report exposed a series of NHS failures in the treatment of Calocane Valdo, a man with schizophrenia who killed three people in Nottingham in 2023.
Sutrics cases Calocan And Axel Rudakubana – Who stabbed three little girls to death and tried to kill several others in Southport in 2024 at the age of 17 – triggered fierce debate On site in the broader society of people with serious mental health problems. According to many, it seems that they do not have one.
Calocane and Rudakubana were labeled “wrong”,, “sadistic” And “coward”in the middle of Renewed calls for the reinstatement of the death penalty.
During the conviction of Rudakubana to a minimum duration of 52 years in January 2025, Judge Goose said: “Many of those who heard the evidence could describe what he has done as an evil, who could challenge him?”
Public opinion on Calocane and Rudakubana seems clear: These are monstersCapable only to inflict misery on others. At best, they do not deserve to live among the right people. At worst, they do not deserve to live at all.
We now know that both Calocan And Rudakubana had received treatment for serious mental health problems, but he stopped engaging with health services before committing their crimes. In the eyes of many – including media commentators,, politicians And Large audience of the public – The suffering of serious mental health does not affect someone’s responsibility for their actions.
As a human being, I consider the story in force of the stories such as that of Calocane and Rudakubana with a huge feeling of sadness. As an agademic specializing in social and Cultural perspectives of mental healthI consider it with a deep feeling of frustration – and perhaps even failure. Let me try to explain why.
A question of responsibility
One of the main reasons why those who have serious mental health problems are usually condemned as bad and irremediable is that We continue to believe that a person should invariably be held responsible for their own actions. This is a harmful vision.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pesjijedxy
Anyone who has worked in the field of mental health knows that there are many cases in which the spirit of people, for all useful purposes, are not theirs. Those, like the Calocanus, suffering from a overwhelming such as schizophreniafor example, often have no understanding of reality and have Moral reasoning hampered.
It is reasonable to say that some people with serious mental health problems can represent a danger to themselves and others. But that does not mean that they should be abandoned or “Locked”. What they need is the support of mental health systems that are really integrated, efficient and reliable.
The victims of Calocane and Rudakubana, their families and all the people cruelly affected by their crimes were catastrophically disappointed in this regard. But Calocane and Rudakubana too. The idea that the pair “stopped committing” is a bad excuse for the Cataclysmic gaps in a system This should be rooted in diligence, awareness and persistent monitoring.
Also uncomfortable the idea, a large part of the responsibility here does not reside with the killers – and it is, of course, what they are – but with Those who left them not taken care of And able to devastate the lives of others and theirs. In the end, it is the system itself that disengages – sometimes with the most appalling consequences.
When the results alone are not enough
Many studies have shown how people under the influence of psychosis and similar diseases Do not choose to be “bad”. They do not choose to live horrible illusions about the world around them. They do not choose to undergo hallucinations which tell them to do terrible acts.
However, the wider public seems to have little or no interest in such conclusions. Alarming, the same could be said of many decision -makers. Their knowledge and opinions are rather more likely to be shaped by rhetoric and instinctive denunciation of the knees.
This goes to the heart of a major challenge for academics in my own field and for the research community as a whole: how to best communicate our work and make it really accessible. We must accept that research alone is often terribly insufficient.
A few years ago, in collaboration with Aardman Animations, the studio behind cleaning names such as Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the sheep, I produced A series of short films Highlight the mental health of young people. In months, these films reached an audience of more than 17 million. More recently, in another effort to pass the word, I wrote The Wonders of Doctor BentA novel that explores the persistent propensity of society to treat isolated and tormented people with the greatest contempt.
None of this means that research is useless – but it is surely a limited value if the ideas it delivers remain largely unrecognized, in particular with regard to the most extraordinary meaning.
Like the useless clamor of mental health and “monsters” dragThe lesson is both clear and familiar: the best way to have conversations on stigma, responsibility and cost of the abdication of our social obligations towards those who suffer from a serious mental illness is to involve the whole of society. Not just the mental health community, the police and the judicial system, but also the general public.