Today a son is in court for killing his mother. He is a paranoid schizophrenic and both he and his mother pleaded with mental health services for him to be admitted to hospital because his mental health was deteriorating, but they were told there were no beds available and that it was safe to send him home. I don't want to demonise those who suffer from mental illness as the perpetrators are often as much a victim as those they kill, but I do question why this keeps on happening.
Quite rightly, whenever there is a high profile case (many 'low profile' ones are under-reported) of a child being abused and killed by a care-giver, there are calls for a National Inquiry. However, when a death is the result of breakdowns in Mental Health care there is rarely an outcry.
Mental Health Services are in total disarray; practitioners are desperately overworked, under-resourced and underfunded; mental health beds have been lost, which means patients are increasingly 'outsourced' at great expense to places such as the Priory Clinics; some recording systems have been deemed unfit for purpose - and yet, there is no public outcry, no political will to effect change and within the NHS a culture of inertia that allows the mantra of 'lessons to be learned' to take the place of action plans.There is no nationally coherent strategy to address the issues that come up time and time again and as long as responses to such tragedies are piecemeal there will be no effective change.
For many of us who worry about accessing services for mentally ill relatives it seems we are in an unrelenting Groundhog Day.
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