The killers with solemn mental health problems are seen as monsters – a terrible defeat of scientists like me

According to Investigation by a hundred familiesA charity organization that supports and advocates families affected by mental health murders, every year 65 people of mentally ill people are murdering. In 2018-2023 390 patients with mental health in England committed or suspected murder or murder.

Discoveries appear after Independent report a series of NHS failures in the treatment of Caldo Calocane was revealed, a Man with schizophrenia who killed three people in Nottingham in 2023.

Cases of killers Calocan AND Axel Rudakubana -who stabbed three little girls to death and tried to kill a few others in Southport in 2024 fierce debate Above a place in a wider society of people with solemn problems of mental health. According to many, they don’t seem to have it.

Calocane and Rudakubana were marked “evil”IN “sadistic” AND “cowardly”among Renewed connections for restoring the death penalty.

During the conviction of Rudakubany to a minimum period of 52 years in January 2025, Justice Goose said: “Many who have heard evidence can describe what he did as evil, who could question it?”

Public opinion on the subject of Calocane and Rudakubana seems clear: They are monstersOnly capable of inflicting unhappiness to others. At best, they do not deserve life between their right people. In the worst case, they don’t deserve life at all.

Now it is known that both Calocan AND Rudakubana He received treatment of solemn mental health problems, but before committing crimes he ceased to engage in health services. In the eyes of many – including media commentatorsIN Politicians AND large swaths of society – Suffering a solemn mental health disease does not affect someone’s responsibility for their actions.

As a human being, I consider the dominant narrative around stories such as Calocane and Rudakubana with a great sense of sadness. As an academic specializing in social and Cultural perspectives of mental healthI think this with a deep sense of frustration – and maybe even failure. I will try to explain why.

Responsibility

The key reason why people with solemn mental health problems are customary as wicked and irreversible, it is We still believe that a person should invariably be held responsible for their own actions. This is a passing simplified view.

Everyone who has worked in the field of mental health knows that there are many cases in which the minds of people, for all purposes and purposes, are not their own. These, like Calocane, suffer overwhelming such as schizophreniaFor example, they often do not understand reality and have difficult moral reasoning.

It is reasonable to say that some people with solemn mental health problems can they represent the danger for themselves and others. But this does not mean that they should be abandoned or “Closed”. They need support from mental health systems, which are really integrated, effective and reliable.

Calocane and Rudakubany victims, their families and all cruelly affected by their crimes were disastrously suspended in this respect. But like Calocane and Rudakubana. The concept that the couple “stopped getting involved” is a bad excuse for Catacilic system defects This should be rooted in care, coverage and persistent observation.

Although an uncomfortable idea, most of the responsibility here is not with the killers – and this is of course – but with the participation – but with Those who left them without reservation and destroy the lives of others and their own. Ultimately, the system itself disconnects – sometimes with The most terrifying consequences.

When the discoveries themselves are not enough

Numerous studies have shown how to embrace psychosis and similar diseases Don’t choose “bad”. They do not decide on terrifying illusions about the world around them. They do not decide to endure hallucinations that tell them to perform terrible deeds.

However, a wider society seems tiny or no interest in such arrangements. A disturbing one can be said about many decision -makers. Their knowledge and opinions are more likely that they will be shaped by rhetoric and condemnation of their knees.

This is the heart of a solemn challenge for scientists in my own field and for the research community as a whole: how to best convey our work and make it really available. We must accept that the tests themselves are often miserably insufficient.

A few years ago, in cooperation with Aardman Animations, a studio behind home names, such as Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, I produced A series of short films emphasizing the mental health of juvenile people. Within months, these films reached the audience over 17 million. Recently, in a different effort to spread information, I wrote Doctor’s miraclesA novel that examines the persistent society’s tendency to treat isolated and tormented people with the highest contempt.

None of this means that the research is pointless – but they certainly have a circumscribed value if he provides the observations that remain largely unknown, especially in the case of matters of the most unusual importance.

As an unpleasant hustle and bustle around mental health and “monsters” stretchesThe lesson is both clear and familiar: the best way to talk about the stigma, responsibility and costs of abdicing our social obligations towards people suffering from a solemn mental illness is to involve the whole society. Not only the mental health community, the police and the justice system, but also the general public.