Numbers – How common are mental health killings in Britain?

• Around 100 families a year will have a loved one killed by someone with mental illness.
• Killings have been increasing steadily over the last five years
• Official figures underestimate the true scale of the problem
• More than 20% of these deaths are preventable.

Increasing steadily
Killings by people with mental health problems have been increasing steadily in Britain over the last six years for which figures are available. [1]

In 2000, 46 people with ‘symptoms of mental illness at the time of the offence’ were convicted of a killing. By 2005 this figure had jumped to 77 – an increase of more than 67%. They account for about 12% of all homicides in England and Wales. [2]

Of these 77 killings, 71 were by recent patients of specialist mental health services.

In around 10 of these cases the victims were children. [3]

Underestimate
Official figures underestimate the true number of victims of the seriously mentally ill in Britain because they only count mentally ill perpetrators of homicide – not the number of victims. And then only those who have been convicted of an offence. [4]

Multiple victims aren’t counted
Daniel Gonzales was a mental health patient who killed four people in September 2004. But only one case was recorded in the statistics because there was just one conviction. [5]

Jael Mullings, Sasikala Navaneethan, and Vivian Gamor were all mentally ill parents who killed their children. Although they killed six children in total only three cases were counted, as there were only three convictions. [6] [7][8]

Alan Scott and Timothy Crook each murdered both their parents. Although there were four victims – only two cases were recorded because there were two convictions. [9][10]

Suicides aren’t counted
If a mentally ill person commits suicide after killing someone – as Steven Rankin[11], William Amesbury[12] and Khalid Peshawan did, they’re also not counted in the official statistics because there was no court case and no conviction.[13]

It’s estimated there are around 30 such cases each year.

Other countries in the UK
And the official figures are for England and Wales only – those for Scotland and Northern Ireland are collected separately.

In Scotland, latest figures (for 2004) show there were 17 homicide convictions of people in recent contact with mental health services. [14]

The analysis for Northern Ireland will be published in 2010.

How many are preventable?
More than a fifth of all mental health homicides (21%) were preventable according to Doctors questioned for the official statistics. [15]

The three factors they thought would have made a difference were
• better patient compliance with treatment,
• closer contact with the patient’s family, and
• closer patient supervision. [16]

Court Psychiatric Reports
Official figures use court psychiatric reports to determine whether someone has ‘mental illness at the time of the offence’.

Such reports are only available in half of all homicide cases in England and Wales.

They show around 12% of all homicides were attributable to mental illness.

In Scandinavia, where court psychiatric reports are routinely carried out in all homicide cases, 20 – 23% of all homicide cases were found to be attributable to mental illness – almost double the British figure. [17]

If psychiatric reports were carried out for all homicides in Britain as they are in Scandinavia, it’s certainly possible they would show considerably higher rates for ‘abnormal mental state at the time of the offence’ than is currently recorded.

CONCLUSION

If you include
• people with symptoms of mental illness at the time of the offence,
• suicides after homicide, and
• cases in Scotland and Northern Ireland,

The true number of victims of mental health killings in Britain each year is more than a hundred.

And that’s before trying to calculate the number of multiple victims.

By way of comparison 108 British troops were killed in Afghanistan in 2009. [18]