During the 1960s it was fashionable to loudly declaim the Victorian institutions where those who did not possess the wherewithal to avoid transgressing society’s mores lived in peace and security.

The inhabitants of these spacious and airy model villages were described as being ‘deprived of their liberty’, never as being protected from the demands of the outer world’s rules.

In time, along with the clarion calls that we were all equal, all the same, came demands for an end to the system which labelled some people ‘cretins’, ‘morons’, and ‘mental defectives’ and provided a safe space for them to live out their lives minimising the dangers to themselves or the rest of the population.

In its place, we put a system whereby the newly re-branded ‘mentally challenged’ were expected to observe the rules of our society and live amongst us. ‘Care in the Community’ was born.

One of the most insidious of the clauses inserted into the new Mental Health Act which wrought these changes was the brainchild of the Royal Society of Psychiatrists. They lobbied hard and won a concession whereby, apart from those who possessed the insight to realise that they needed a voluntary ‘rest’ from observing society’s rules, the only people they could be forced to provide this haven of space for, were those they deemed to be ‘treatable’.

Those who, either through physical trauma to their brain, or by virtue of the untreatable nature of a congenital brain condition, were beyond help, were excluded from this system. Removed from the model farm in the countryside inhuman Victorian institution, they were expected to live in the accommodation provided by social services.

Not possessing the social knowledge to refuse the graffiti ridden flat, refused by all other potential tenants, on a windswept redundant mining village, surrounded by drug addicts, illegal immigrants and squatters, they were supposed to ‘fit in’ with the aid of a hard pressed social worker dropping by for a cup of tea once a month. Their benefit books were stolen, they were beaten up, and some were murdered for their meagre possessions.

Their only salvation came when, for instance, they failed to realise that fatally silencing the 14 year old girl who has refused your burgeoning sexual demands is not considered by us an acceptable response to the age old problem of a girl finding you unattractive, and they were carted off to the Crown court with a segment of society banging on the side of the prison van and screaming ‘evil monster’.

Once convicted, they would be presented to a prison service staffed by medically unqualified assistants, who stood guard over society’s new Demon – the ‘evil monster’.

We demonised the old places of safety; we demonise the tragic doings of those who cannot manage life without a place of safety. In between, we demonise those who would so much as suggest that some people cannot cope with the confusing and fast paced life we have engineered for ourselves.

I once knew a man, a happily married family man, father of two, who was involved in a car accident. Hurled through the windscreen, he left that part of his brain which enables us to tell right from wrong, to draw back from actions which we know to fall on the side of wrong, splattered on the lamp post which halted his airborne trajectory. It is situated at the front of the brain, a most vulnerable situation.

His life was saved by the Doctors, and his wife was presented with a shadow of the man she had married to take home with her. When you have once enjoyed the company of a soul mate, partner, lover, friend, it is difficult to cope with finding him replaced by a man who smashes up the kitchen when annoyed at being asked to take the bins out; a man who sees violent physical rape as the answer to his sexual urges; a man no longer capable of seeing the wrong in hurling the baby across the room when awakened by his screams. She divorced him and took her children away to a place where he could no longer hurt them.

Devoid of both that area of his brain which controlled his inhibitions and the ‘carer’ forcibly appointed by the state – his wife, who had controlled his worst excesses, he saw no wrong in driving once more. In fact he saw no reason to be restrained by society’s observance of the rule that you stop at a red light. He was soon involved in another head-on collision. An entirely innocent fellow driver, fully entitled to expect that his green light meant that he could drive safely across the junction was left paralysed. He, himself, was deprived of a second segment of his brain. Once more the Doctors patched him up, pronounced themselves entirely satisfied with their handiwork, and returned him to do his best at living amongst us.

The local papers proudly announced that he was now a millionaire, courtesy of the insurance companies involved. The predatory drug dealers soon paid him a visit. Plagued by headaches, he sought and found, solace in hard drugs and alcohol. They blocked out the memory of the life he once had, the children lost, the wife long gone.

The social workers called by his unassuming bungalow, surrounded by elderly retirees, from time to time. They came in pairs, well aware of the danger to life and limb posed by a man who could not tell right from wrong. His Father could no longer bear to meet him, his Mother stayed in touch by telephone.

The psychiatrists refused to give him safe harbour on the grounds that what ailed him was untreatable – they could not put back the brain function he had lost.

The bleeding heart liberals continued to say that depriving him of his liberty was ‘inhuman’, and they went on selling off the old hospitals to developers to provide new homes for young couples.

It was my misfortune to have to step out of the sunny suburban street and into his closeted, curtain drawn, filthy, drug addled world. His drug dealer was in attendance. Between them, they had decided that I was the answer to his mounting indebtedness to the dealer, and I was to stay there until the bill had been paid. The part of his brain that I might have appealed to with reason or logic no longer existed. There was nothing I could say that would determine my fate. I cannot tell you of the cold fear that settles in your stomach as that realisation dawns. It left me with a permanent fear of stepping into the world of such inadequates.

For inadequate is what they are, as is Jon Venables. Inadequately equipped to live by our rules.

Eventually that man will do ’something’ – kill another motorist, rape a girl, imprison another visitor, decide that his dealer’s head would look better mounted on a pole outside Tesco’s, who can say? He doesn’t have the ability to determine that – neither do we.

We wait, consoling ourselves that we have a caring society, that he is just the same as us, that social workers calling in tandem once a month will effect a change – and when they don’t, we will pick up our newspapers and howl our outrage at ‘the Tesco pole murderer’, we will shout and holler as the prison van goes past, bang on the sides, and call him an evil monster. A judge will solemnly declare that he is a danger to society; lawyers will go to the European Courts to try to release him from an ‘inhuman’ life of incarceration. Journalists will write articles describing how he was little more than a child when all this occurred, that redemption should be available to all of us.

We don’t know the circumstances of Jon Venables return to prison, but I do know that somewhere, in a quiet suburban street, or a windswept abandoned mining village, an innocent couple will have been required to live next door to him, unknowing, unsuspecting. I know too, that he will have been required to turn his inadequate brain to the task of understanding our rules and living by them.

Now that he has spectacularly failed, we can vent our anger at him, hound him, demand that he be locked up for life, and castigate him. Evil Monster – how dare he prove inadequate to the task of living amongst us?

All this, so I am told, is a vast improvement on the old system of ‘depriving innocent men and women of their liberty’ – or of providing them with a barrier between what they are capable of doing and what we expect them to do – at least until they become official ‘evil monsters’. Then we pop them into a Victorian prison.

We do not expect those who have lost part of a leg to hop round until they fall over. Then call them evil for falling over. Why do we expect those who have a damaged brain to do the equivalent? Why do we deny the existence of mental inadequacy, pretend it doesn’t exist?

Could it be connected to the desire of the Royal College of Psychiatrists to only be presented with ‘curable’ conditions, or those who volunteer themselves as guinea-pigs?

I dare say the social workers would like to be presented only with those cases they can do something about, not the intransigent. They don’t have such a powerful lobby, so must go on doing their best, and weeping when we demonise their failures.

1
Brian March 7, 2010 at 11:20

Anna,
Thank you for another perfect blogpost.

2
JuliaM March 7, 2010 at 11:50

Agreed.

3
Alan March 7, 2010 at 13:52

Anna,

A very insightful article. Thank you.

You describe a systemic lack of empathy. Overflowing with sympathy perhaps but not able to see things through the eyes of the public, the ill or the staff tasked with caring for them. The notion that there are people who need to be protected from society has been replaced with the Fabian ideal that if you give people what they have not they will become model citizens.

Are these also the unintended consequences of fighting against abuse perpetrated in institutions? Rather than reforms and prosecutions they were torn down (or sold off for development). It is almost as if the buildings took the blame for the people staffing them.

Partisanship and advocacy has it’s place but perhaps that place is outside the bureaucratic system, which should be trying to best balance the interests of everyone. We see it today with so many things – smoking, education, climate change and all that. Stakeholders get a hand on the steering wheel and it becomes a slow-motion car crash. You game the system by first defining who is and isn’t a stakeholder. The public rarely is. Taxpayers even less so. Fake charities usually are. Corporate interests too. In this example the RSP clearly were as well. They provide a much reduced and convenient lump to co-operate with. Let others come up with ideas and all a bureaucrat can be blamed with is implementing them. This is how potty ideas become policy.

The Victorians weren’t always right but they weren’t always wrong either.

4
Rog March 7, 2010 at 14:29

I too have met several people caught in the loop of enforced liberalism.
People dreadfully unable to care for themselves or others, but forced to ‘enjoy’ their freedom.
Many years ago I ‘visited’ a lady who over several weeks/months had filled her living room with her own poo, piled in a heap on the carpet. I had to wait for a Doctor for quite a while, and thankfully after many years of similar situations I got on quite well with this lady.
On arrival of the young female doctor the situation changed in a heart beat. The doctor raised her voice, would not listen, and promptly got her nose broken.
The lady with the night soil just wanted to be looked after, with people, in a institution, she didn’t have the energy or mind to look after herself. She was ill.
She got her wish, the doctor gained hundreds of experience points and all was resolved.
Unfortunately with many places closing or closed this is coming to a place near you in the future. The Tories started this. Every other party will carry it on.

5
Delphius1 March 8, 2010 at 07:58

Absolutely spot on post, as usual.

My son is Autistic, but only mildly so. He is gullible and vulnerable in todays society, and especially lacks restraint when it comes to money.

So, he needs constant care. As my family’s life expentancy is pretty poor, naturally I wanted to get him into some sort of supported housing before I expired and he came to grief trying to support himself.

Would anyone help? No. He didn’t come under learning difficulties as he was too intelligent, nor did he come under mental health, because he didn’t have a “recognised” (i.e. treatable) mental health problem.

Such is care in the community where service providers use local government compartmentalisation and the “Its not our responsibility” line in order to shirk their duty of care. to those who need it.

So much for care in the community. I’ve always thought it was a scam to release the grounds of the old mental institutions to supermarkets to make a fast buck.

6
PT March 8, 2010 at 09:11

Anna, you are absolutely right. But….. as LAPD “carps” would say – follow the money. One of the most important functions of any department of bureaucracy in this country is to protect its own budget. This means hiving off responsibility for anything that looks expensive to some other department, and most of the bureacratic empires in the UK have become much more expert and diligent in this regard than they are in doing the jobs which we foolishly assume we pay them to do.

7
Valerie March 8, 2010 at 14:47

Dear Ms Raccoon,

Very interesting subject and as usual very well written indeed and powerful.

Yesterday, I was watching a documentary on French television about psychiatric hospitals and could only admire the doctors and nurses in charge ; that is what could be called “a calling” as it is so admirable that some people are willing to put themselves at risk with ultra-violent patients (as it was filmed in a special unit : “unite de malades difficiles” and the name is quite soft compared to what they are able of !).

I was just wondering if this is a real story which happened to you that prompted you to write : “It left me with a permanent fear of stepping into the world of such inadequates.” Nevertheless I find it disgusting that it is a reponsibility left to a lady to visit herself such dangerous people ; in such a case two people and preferably strong and physically impressive men should be dealing with such a job.

Also the “expert-psychiatrists” can release dangerous people with absolutely no risk for themselves or their family as it is highly unlikely their patients would end up living in the same neighbourhood…it is always for “the plebe” to bear the misery as usual.

I am surprised by your way of seeing things as I thought you were a libertarian and against “the nanny-state”.

I also think that whether in France or in England, some people would benefit from the old system as it existed previously as we can see the new one as proved disastrous.

8
Anna Raccoon March 8, 2010 at 15:28

Valerie,

Yes, it is a true story, and I have never worked since – it is why I am now retired and living in France.

I am against the Nanny State, but there are some things – for instance maintaining an army to defend one’s territory – which have to be done by the State. Providing a safe haven for the vulnerable would be another. Being a Libertarian is not the same as being an Anarchist. I don’t advocate ‘no government’ just minimal government, only where essential. Of course Libertarians can argue for hours amongst themselves as to what is ‘essential’!!!!