Why us?

I have been depressed lately and Why Did You Kill My Dad? (BBC1, Monday) wasn’t what I needed at all.

I have been depressed lately and Why Did You Kill My Dad? (BBC1, Monday) wasn’t what I needed at all. In it award-winning film-maker Julian Hendy interviewed the families of some of the 100 innocents who are randomly murdered each year by psychopaths. Hendy’s dad was one of them. It was all so sensitively, movingly done, and the ‘Why us?’ testimonies of the bereaved parents, wives and children were so heartbreaking that it made you want to cry.

The villain of the piece was the psychiatric establishment. Throughout the 1980s, we learnt — perhaps it’s the case still — it was standard practice for trainee psychiatrists to be taught that there was no connection between violence and mental illness. This means that many of the consultants running our regional Mental Health Trusts are basing important decisions about public safety on a politically correct lie.

Last year there were over 38,000 physical assaults on staff ‘in mental-health and learning-disability settings’ — higher than in any other NHS sector — yet the R.D. Laing-influenced mental-health industry doesn’t want us to know, lest we conjure up unhelpful images of mad-axeman murderers lurking in every alley. The shrinks are much less worried that you or I might end up chopped to bits than they are that one of their precious charges might feel discriminated against. That’s why there are no ‘mentally ill’ any more, only ‘service users’. And if they kill someone it’s not a ‘death’ but ‘an adverse event’ or a ‘seriously untoward incident’.

When a pair of mental-health professionals were called on to defend themselves on Newsnight, one rather foolishly ventured that 100 deaths a year was not that many.