There was a loony on my train the other day. He sat quietly for most of the journey, but when we pulled into a station he began barking like a dog; that’s how I knew he was a loony, the barking bit, not the sitting quietly bit. Every station, his head went back and he began to bark and yowl and you could see little flecks of foam, agitated saliva, at the corners of his mouth. Then, when the train left the station he went back to reading the Daily Mirror in silence, although he would snuffle from time to time. His fellow passengers treated him with wary tolerance, glancing over from time to time but careful not to catch his eye. I smiled at him once, in an uplifting and encouraging manner, but he looked uncomprehendingly beyond me. He had his legs slightly protruding into the gangway and at one station, as he barked away, a man trying to — what is the word these officious attendants use? — detrain, stood several feet back from him and loudly requested he withdraw his limbs, as they were obstructive.
As I say, the detraining man stood a few feet back from the loony as he said this, as if he were potentially toxic. The mentalist complied without comment, pulled his legs in, but continued barking. Didcot Parkway? Woof woof woof. Reading? Woof woof woof. The rest of us let him bark but, you could tell, we were all of us a little wary, a little more vigilant than usual, just in case his bite might be worse than his bark. You can’t tell with loonies. That’s the thing about them. You can’t tell.
The barking train loony was fresh in my mind when I watched the exemplary and painstaking BBC2 documentary Why Did You Kill My Dad?, followed by a debate on Newsnight, this week. The film-maker Julian Hendy came at the story — the link between mental illness and homicide and general violence — with a certain angle: his dad had been stabbed to death by a nutter in 2007. You note these pejorative terms — nutter, loony, mentalist — are mine, not Hendy’s; I don’t think that he would subscribe to them. But nonetheless Hendy, after years of research, had come to the conclusion that there is a threat to the general public from the whacko and the berserk which exceeds that which is admitted by the mental health professionals, or most of them.
The party line, agreed by all in authority, is that you are less likely to be murdered by someone with a mental health problem than you are by a drunk, but Hendy proved this to be not the case. In fact, the real numbers of people killed by those with mental health problems is roughly double what the official statistics suggest — somewhere in the region of two people per week. And a sort of overweening political correctness is partly to blame for this, an insistence that begins with the conviction — reasonable enough, by itself — that people with mental health problems should not be stigmatised and that the general public has got it wrong, out of a mixture of spite and ignorance, when it contemplates the mentally ill.
Allied to this are the implications from the mental health charities that it is therefore quite wrong, and perhaps should be illegal, for us to use such pejorative terms as loony, nutter, psycho, madman; that the mentally ill, uh, community should not be regarded with suspicion at all. And a party line develops, much as it has done with those other anti-isms launched with the best of intentions (anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-bullying and so on), which begins to obscure the truth, and then later manipulates the data and vilifies anyone who might disagree with it.
The current paradigm regarding mental illness is not quite Ronnie Laing’s idle and vacuous assertion that being a lunatic is a healthy reaction to an unhealthy society, but it’s not a million miles away from that; it has that notion lodged away at the back of its mind. Instead, it rather portrays the person who suffers from a mental illness as a victim not of the illness itself — an implication that the professionals would disavow — but from the rest of the society, the non-mentally-ill. And what follows from this is an insistence that we, those of us who are not mentally ill, or at least those of us who have not yet been diagnosed as such, have got it wrong; that all of the mentally ill are threatless, less of a threat than the rest of us, the nominally sane.
There’s a brilliant book from a Leeds University professor called Peter Morrall, entitled Madness and Murder, which deals with all of this stuff in a rather more sophisticated manner than I have here. Morrall argues that the public has a right to fear the threat from homicidal lunatics and gleefully debunks the notion that the threat from the mentally unwell is ‘a media-orchestrated fabrication’. Indeed, Morrall suggests that ‘long-term damage’ has been done to the acceptance by the community of ‘mentally disordered’ people because of the ‘unrealistic response by the psychiatric disciplines to genuine and understandable (if inflated) fears about the risk posed by the mentally disordered’. He suggests that the public is within its rights to worry about the risk from madmen, and that it is not a newspaper confection.
Of course, only a small proportion of deranged people are likely to kill us. My guess is that they are many thousands of times more likely to kill us apropros of nothing, however, rather than for predictable, semi-rational reasons. This is a valid point: we could take steps to protect ourselves against the homicidal intentions of enemies, or drunks, or spurned lovers, knowing the source of their motivation. But there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves from the truly barking mad, save to regard them with intense suspicion when they greet the arrival of Didcot Parkway with a prolonged yapping and foam around the mouth. And to keep an eye out for them, perhaps to derogate them, in our minds, as lunatics or mentalists, the sorts of people from whom we might expect something out of the ordinary — perhaps some alfresco and unbidden sexual act, perhaps howled abuse, perhaps something more proactive, with a knife — we can’t be sure. This does not mean that we should victimise them or in any other sense treat them in a discriminatory manner — just keep our eyes open and know what we are dealing with. As almost everybody does, in fact, except for the people in the know.
Offer ends in:
