Last summer, a young man – let’s call him Daniel – walked into a hospital A&E department in England and told doctors that he had schizophrenia. He had struggled with his mental health for years, and now he wanted help. But after he was briefly seen by an early intervention team, he was discharged. A few days later, he stabbed a stranger whom he deemed to be a threat to his life, and now he’s locked away in a prison cell. “I’m devastated for him,” his mother tells me, “and concerned for others in similar situations.”
It’s worth pointing out that the vast majority of people with schizophrenia are not violent. And this is not about the NHS’s overworked and underpaid army of staff, who overwhelmingly do their best in unnecessarily challenging circumstances. It is instead a plea for attention to solve one of the great under-discussed crises of modern Britain: the mental distress that blights the lives of millions of citizens, and the lack of provision to tackle it.
