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6 J. Forensic Psychiatry & Psych. 1 (1995)

handle is hein.journals/jnlofncpy6 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITORIALS Homicide and care in the community DAVID TIDMARSH In 1982, concerned at the admission to Broadmoor in quick succession of three psychotic patients, all of whom had killed relatives after being refused admission to hospital, I wrote to The Times (Tidmarsh, 1982) suggesting that the recently proposed Mental Health Act Commission should have a duty to investigate incidents in which psychiatric patients had caused serious harm and that the confidential enquiries into maternal deaths conducted by the Department of Health would be a suitable model (Department of Health, 1994). This suggestion received no support at all and the 1983 Mental Health Act laid no such duty on the new commission or indeed on anyone else. Incidents continued but public, or more accurately political, attitudes were slow to change, the prevailing dogma being that mental illness could not lead to serious harm. These attitudes were perhaps exemplified by the extreme reluctance and the 2½-year delay which preceded the setting-up of the inquiry into the death of Isabel Schwarz, a social worker killed by one of her clients (Spokes, 1988). The report of this inquiry prompted the National Schizophrenia Fellowship to ask the Department of Health to set up systematic enquiries into all such homicides. Discussions were started but were overtaken by widespread press reports of the killing of a young girl by a recently discharged schizophrenic woman (Trent Health Authority, 1991) and the sudden decision by Mr Stephen Dorrell, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, in October 1991 to set up an inquiry covering not only homicides but deaths by suicide among psychiatric patients, a very much wider remit. The inquiry is directed by Dr William Boyd, formerly the vice-chairman of the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland, and his preliminary report on homicide has now been published (Boyd, 1994). In the meantime there had been significant developments. In the autumn of The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry Vol 6 No 1 May 1995 1-5 ©Routledge 1995 ISSN 0958-5184