Fatal flaws of Care in the Community plan
CARE IN the Community was one of the great humanitarian acts of the second half of the last century, as closure of the Victorian workhouses was in the first half.When the old, huge mental hospitals were opened up and their patients discharged to normal living a massive injustice was at last despatched to the past. Heaven knows what the doctors had been doing, because some people had spent decades in these institutions merely for being deaf, others were admitted at the instigation of families because they had given birth to illegitimate children and many merely had what these days we term “learning difficulties”.
All needed help with adjusting to a normal life and in my constituency, I felt moved to tears when I saw people living in normal houses with carpets, curtains and furniture, learning to cook, shop, budget and deal with crossing roads, who just a few weeks before had been so unnecessarily cut off from the world in large, impersonal institutions.
Yet, as I observed in my autobiography 11 years ago, by which time Care in the Community had been up and running for 20 years, we got it wrong with the schizophrenics. The underlying assumption was that as such sufferers are usually calm when on medication, they would take their medicine as directed because that was what would keep them functioning normally. It was utterly naïve but there has been a failure on the part of successive health ministers to get it right and the results have been literally fatal.
The experience of the average paranoid schizophrenic is sectioning, stabilising, release, sectioning, stabilising and again release. That was what happened to Valdo Calocane, sectioned four times and still released and as a consequence three people, including two youngsters, are now dead.
YET ALL the classic signs were there: a belief he was being spied on by MI5, hearing voices, episodes of violence and, above all, a history of ignoring his medication. He should have been treated and kept in secure accommodation – full stop.
I rarely have a good word to say about the Crown Prosecution Service but it is taking a lot of ill-conceived flak over its decision to bring manslaughter rather than murder charges. The man is clearly mad and that was the best way to ensure he would be locked up for life. As for the media alarmism that he could be released in three years, that is arrant rot. The judge said he would probably never be released and that is because schizophrenia is never “healed” but is instead managed and Calocane has no record of being able to manage his condition.
How many others are still among us?