Hygenia Legere works in NHS mental health services in London. Hygenia Legere is a pseudonym.
Zephaniah McLeod was released in April 2020 after nearly a decade in prison. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2013 and had been under the care of mental health teams both in prison and in the community since then. In September 2020, McLeod took a knife, went out into Birmingham city centre and stabbed eight people, and then went home to bed. He is currently serving a life term with a minimum tariff of 21 years.
The independent investigation report commissioned by NHS England makes for grim reading. McLeod consistently refused to engage with any mental health services or treatment. By the time he was released, he had lived with untreated psychosis for at least ten years. The longest anyone had known him to take medication was five days.
The court heard, “McLeod had long reported hearing voices telling him to kill or stab people and saw shadows, but did not regularly take the anti-psychotic drugs he was prescribed, believing his medication to be homing devices used by the Government to monitor him, and refused to speak to psychiatrists in prison or engage with mental health services.” Outside of prison, McLeod used cannabis every day to “drown out the voices and stress of people being after him”.
McLeod’s life during the periods he wasn’t in prison was nasty, brutish, and short. He was arrested repeatedly for violent robbery, theft, carrying knives and firearms, threatening and assaulting members of the public, beating his partners and child, and failing to surrender to custody. A pre-sentencing report indicated that he had few protective factors – he had no stable accommodation, no money, and no means of getting a job (having been expelled from school at 14).
In November 2018, probation services experimented with releasing him on licence to an approved forensic hostel. McLeod took up smoking cannabis daily, complained of hearing voices telling him to murder and rape, and repeatedly confronted members of the public because he thought they were looking at him funny. He was recalled to prison a month later. In March 2019, McLeod wrote a complaint that prison was bad for his mental health.
The report is scathing about the failure of mental health services to engage McLeod or each other, but for every missed opportunity, there are dozens of appointments or interactions with psychiatrists, care coordinators, and occupational therapists that he either ignored, cut short, or denied to them that he had any kind of problem.
The question has to be asked: if McLeod had attended every appointment, if every report had been sent to the right people, if the correct forms had been filled out – what would have turned out differently?
At no point in any of this rapsheet of a life was McLeod considered to be lacking in mental capacity. He could not be forced to take medication, he could not be compelled to attend therapy or psychoeducation, and he could not be made to account for his behaviour. So he didn’t.
It’s hard to see how any one of the professionals involved with McLeod could have foreseen that this paranoid petty criminal with a history of acquisitive crime would wake up one evening and attempt to murder eight strangers in cold blood. That escalated quickly. But I fail to see how better paperwork would have addressed the underlying problem.
Someone with a history of violence, who was known to hear command hallucinations telling him to harm people, with no means of supporting or housing himself legitimately, was put on the streets over and over again and everyone in authority sat around waiting to see how it would go this time. Sometimes they helpfully informed all his former partners to let them know if he tried to hurt them. That paperwork need keeping up to date.
The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Mcleod had been randomly attacking members of the public for nearly fifteen years. He is 31 years old and is eligible for release on license in 17 years. What plan do we have as a society for Mcleod if he is released aged 48?
Will we open the door to the prison and warn him to try to not to kill anyone this time? Or will we finally learn our lessons now written in Jacob Billingham’s blood, and come up with a better solution for how we manage people with this kind of risk profile?
The interaction between mental health and criminal justice is one fraught with difficulty. It is not fair on all people struggling with mental illness to charge them with pre-crime and restrict their lives. The correlation between poverty, early childhood trauma, and the kind of gutter existence Mcleod got to call his life is well known.
But it is also outrageous for our compassion for such people and unwillingness to pay for their containment should lead to an apparent belief that it is adequate to record someone robbing, assaulting, and threatening members of the public and respond by politely calling on them once a week to ask if they’d like to take an anger management course yet.
We are failing them and ourselves in declining to engage with this madness.
The post Hygenia Legere: The case of Zephaniah McLeod epitomises our mad approach to criminal justice and mental health appeared first on Conservative Home.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Hygenia Legere
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.conservativehome.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.