ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the corollary of the construction of mental health service users as ‘high-risk’ to others has been the construction of ‘the community’ as vulnerable. The discourse of community as vulnerable is most readily discernible in mental health inquiries into homicides – made mandatory from 1994 by Virginia Bottomley as then Secretary of State for Health – and in the media accounts which invariably accompanied the events and then the publication of inquiry reports which followed them. The following quotation from one inquiry report illustrates the point:
Winston Williams, a diagnosed schizophrenic with a history of violence and drug abuse...was allowed to roam the streets of Reading as a so-called ‘care in the community’ patient...My constituents wish to challenge the procedures which allowed Mr Williams to remain at large. (A Reading MP to the Home Secretary 24.05.00 and 19.09.00)
(Johns et al. 2002: 3)
It is evident from this quotation that Williams was regarded as an outsider who had punctured the safety of a community of ‘constituents’. The emphasis on his presence in public spaces such as the street is significant because of the sociocultural association this has with blurred boundaries and strangers as perplexing figures (Mossman 1997), as explored later in this chapter. It has been argued that policies have reconfigured the way professionals behave and are held accountable for their practice in relation to so-called ‘high-risk’ service users, and that the anxiety engendered by numerous homicide inquiry reports have been a powerful political tool in this respect (Eastman 1996; Muijen 1996; Szmukler 2000; Warner 2006). Further, there is evidence that the concept of dangerousness in the context of mental health is both gendered and racialised because it is young, black men who have been the focus of concern (Browne 1995; Keating et al. 2002; Sayce 1995) and this theme is explored in some depth.
