At 4pm on the 17th of December 1992, Jonathan Zito was stabbed to death by a stranger at a London Underground station.
This wasn’t an isolated tragedy. From the 1980s onwards, Conservative governments emptied Britain’s mental hospitals and moved thousands of patients into “the community” — but without providing the support or services they needed. NHS spending on mental health plummeted, while spending on management doubled, thanks to the internal market and the new breed of Unit General Managers.
Homelessness soared. City centres filled with the drunk and the drugged. At first, these were people with mental health problems who had fallen out of care, lost access to benefits, and turned to drink or drugs to cope. Then came the chaotic — the hangers-on, addicts, and alcoholics — and finally the dangerous and psychotic, who preyed on the rest.
Eventually, a random member of the public — Jonathan Zito — was killed. And only then did the people who’d ignored the problem for years start to demand action.
It’s worth remembering that people with mental illness are far more likely to be victims of violence than to commit it. Long before Jonathan Zito died, countless vulnerable and mentally ill people had perished unnoticed — but no one cared until a “respectable” member of the public became a victim.
When Labour came to power in 1997, they spent vast sums rebuilding what had been destroyed: outreach services, forensic teams, and new Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder units. Gradually, the homeless and the hopeless disappeared from our streets.
I chaired the North East Forensic Mental Health Consortium for a few years, when we were still trying to fix the problem. I once interviewed a burly CPN for a role who told us about his experience “in ’Nam.”
“Vietnam?” I asked.
“No, mate — Tottenham,” he replied.
By 2010 I’d moved to DWP, just in time for the Conservatives to return to power. They set about dismantling the progress Labour had made — on both the NHS and welfare sides. I warned repeatedly that these cuts would have consequences. But ministers like Iain Duncan Smith, cheered on by the Mail and Telegraph, spun a convincing story about “scroungers” living off the hard work of others. Even Nick Clegg joined in, with his smug talk of “alarm clock Britain.”
And so homelessness soared again. Once again, gangs of the drunk and the drugged appeared in town centres. Once again, the tragic were joined by the chaotic — and finally, by the dangerous and psychotic.
It may be that this weekend’s tragedy on the East Coast Mainline is the latest Jonathan Zito. Or maybe it’ll be the next one.
But it will happen.
And it will keep happening until we confront what’s been broken — not just NHS mental health services, but also the way the DWP sanctions the vulnerable to hit performance targets.
https://jon-chadwick.com/page/2/?s=mental+health
Sadly the narrative of scroungers is alive and kicking. I hear it regularly amongst friends and on social media. We are still picking up the pieces of austerity in just about every corner of civic society. I was in Sheffield at the weekend and I was taken aback by the number of homeless people and in particular women – most with evidently mental health problems. The lack of investment in mental health services over the past fifteen years is staggering. Even when money was earmarked in uplifts to NHS budgets it was very rarely actually ringenced. It would often be siphoned off to other more pressing priorities. We are sadly reaping what we have sown or indeed haven’t sown.
… and inevitably the cost of fixing the problem will be a lot more than the cost of funding services properly in the first place