Axel Rudakubana

[Dylanxoxo]

I haven't seen anything in articles I have read about Axel Rudakubana today about a mental health assessment. His behaviour is so extreme, that it is difficult not to suspect he is suffering from an untreated mental health condition. Does anyone else think that mental illness may be at the root of his horrific crimes?

I worked in a secure adolescent psych unit on the nineties, and trust me, there have always been kids like this. They were just out of sight.

I agree. I have a male relative who was always bit strange, lacked empathy, never seemed happy and narcissistic since childhood. He made his siblings life hell literally terrorising them. His parents sought help but couldn’t get anything effective. Eventually as he got bigger even though he never hit them, he was threatening enough that his own parents were scared of him.

Since he became an adult he sits in his room (still lives with his DM, his DF moved out) on the net. He believes every conspiracy going and became particularly abusive around the subject of vaccines during Covid. He says some really strange stuff with a threatening menace. It seems he really hates the world.

Family members including myself think he’s a ticking timebomb but until someone actually commits a crime or is diagnosed with a mental illness, there’s barely anything that can be done unless you fully understand how to navigate the system.

Once the Stockport inquest is held, we’ll see the full horrors of the social care system revealed.

The age old 'is he mad or bad' discussion.

The only want mental illness would be a mitigating factor here would be if it were proven he was in a psychotic episode at the time and had zero control over his actions/lacked any understanding of what he was doing. That will have been assessed for.

The fact he shouted in court he's glad the victims are dead, months after he did it, would indicate he wasn't psychotic at the time.

Unfortunately people find it hard to acknowledge that human beings can do this and want to do this sort of heinous act without being acutely mentally unwell. But they can. Similarly shocking and devastating acts will have been committed every day since this attack across the globe that we haven't heard about.

As a mental health professional and someone with a diagnosis of a severe mental health condition I’m increasingly sick of people who erroneously conflate awful, illegal and immoral behaviour with “mental illness”.

There are all sorts of reasons people end up in a life of anger, violence, crime and deviance. Very few of them are due to being “mentally ill”.

The reasons are far more likely due to a combination of core personality, poor upbringing, childhood trauma, social conditioning, neglect, drugs, peer influence, social exclusion, disrupted education, lack of socialisation, exposure to violent and pornographic imagery, radicalisation etc etc …..

The quest in general society / media to label these villains as “sick” or “mentally ill” both absolves them of responsibility and further stigmatises severe mental illness (which in the vast majority of cases has no violent element to it).

I completely disagree. It does not stigmatise mental illness at all.

He does not have a mental health condition. Yet, we use words such as sick, ill ( I am), knowing he is not quite right. But, he does not have a mental health condition as such.

Alot of things could have fed into this but there are a few things that are being glossed over here.

Edit - please stop jumping to the narrative anyone saying this is trying to excuse or defend him. Seriously. No one really wants him free here.

That’s right - with the emphasis on “treatable”. A MH section is a treatment order (there are short-term sections for assessment, but those are generally only for 48hrs or so).

If it is untreatable (because he is just a violent little shit) you can’t section them.

It would have to be voluntary is my understanding. With all his flags, if say Prevent did refer for MH service support, they could have pushed back based on this I guess.

I wonder if his mum would have appreciated a chance to drug him up to the eye balls. I would not blame her. Wonder if it would have changed anything.

Scary.

I think people mean “sick” as in “sickening/depraved”. Not mentally ill.

I agree we haven’t seen anything to suggest a treatable mental illness here, but no mentally “normal” person stabs a six year old 122 times. There is obviously something badly wrong with him, and has been for years. It is worth considering whether anything more could have been done earlier, given the fact he was widely recognised as “not right” since he was 11, and was known to CAMHS, SS, Prevent and the police.

I don’t think it is stigmatising to people with depression to discuss that.

@Saschka completely agree.

I agree with you

It's disgustingly disabilist to conflate violence to mental illness.

I’m in Scotland but up here all murder accused are examined separately by two psychiatrists. Do you not think there might be similar provision in England?

Also, even if mental illness is a factor, it doesn’t mean his culpability was affected by it. He knew exactly what he was doing and that it was wrong.

Therefore YABU

I think peoples childhood definitely play a part in who they become.

I used to go to a local group. But there is a really nasty man in it. He is so horrible, rude and cruel.

He told me about his childhood once .

His dad was horrible and totally abandoned him.

If you weren't loved as a child, you are going to be cold and cruel to other people.

I think the worst cruel people often have terrible childhoods

I do think the Rwanda genocide could have been the seed that kicked off the obsession. It could have started with shock after hearing the stories shared by elders and then become anger, that led to a fascination with other genocides as he then moved on to Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, etc.

In her Reith lectures Gwen Adshead talks about an evil state of mind. I think he must have had a very difficult childhood, was possibly bullied a lot, and was radicalised by the internet. None of that excuses what he did and he does deserve to stay in prison for the rest of his life. As she says, trying to understand the causes doesn't excuse the actions but it does give us the chance to try to prevent similar events in the future https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1hQF5SLbjPBb8sDr9zHDbKX/bbc-reith-lectures-2024-four-questions-about-violence

I have known since I was a teen, due to a siblings' work at the time, it's standard to give people who commit heinous crimes a mental health assessment before their trial. This is to stop them claiming that they are mentally ill so being sectioned and causing issues at the likes of Broadmoor with their behaviour.

There was a time period in the nineties were loads of killers were claiming they were mentally insane as they know the likes of Broadmoor were a "lighter touch" compared to category A prisons.

I don’t think people are conflating the two, however, it’s clear he was not presenting as neurotypical since aged 11. Healthy kids don’t become obsessed with mass murders to the point they call Childline.

If it’s just decided he’s ‘evil’ and it’s Amazon’s fault for sending him a knife, case closed, there’s will be no drive to change processes to limit the chance of this happening again.

It’s in all of our interests that children cannot slip through the cracks whilst everyone watches them become increasingly depraved.

How do we know there aren’t more Axel’s out wandering neighbourhoods with their parents at home praying their son doesn’t do anything bad? Kids like Axel should be in secure units.

I want lessons learned and action taken.

When other people hurt you emotionally, you definitely become cruel.

I used to be really kind.

Then I went to visit my dad when I an adult.

He hadn't been in my life when I was a child.

I naively thought he would be pleased to see me. He wasn't. He told me that he didn't want to see me again.

After that, It definitely made a harder, crueller person. It's like I can't remember how to be really kind anymore.

People hurt us and we hurt others. It's a chain of pain.

I remember naoimi Campbell said that aswell about her life. I just happened to be reading about her life recently.

She was always getting into trouble for being really angry and shouting at people. She said that when her dad abandoned her , it had made her become a really angry person

That doesn't give you an excuse to kill innocent children. He had his parents around and his dad actively was involved to try to stop him harming others.

I never said it does give anyone an excuse to kill innocent children.

I said that if you look at a lot of murderers, or people who do really bad things

They will have suffered come kind of severe abuse as a child.

We need to look at the bigger picture.

Society as a whole needs to improve.

There is too much child abuse going on

He was so cold that he didn't care who he hurt.

What made him like that.

I think so too, Coolas, but people cannot be restrained before actually doing something. It's true the boy's dad was very concerned and tried to prevent anything happening but that is so very difficult. Things like this have always happened throughout history and probably always will, it's a horrible fact.

Nope he was assessed. He's just evil.

I see that he has said that he experienced severe racist bullying at school.

It was a recipe for disaster. If he came to a country where he thinks people don't care about him at all, and then he also probably got radicalised by some groups.

He's definitely not going to care about anyone else.

Killing to him is nothing.

Agreed. No excuse at all. My family member who I mentioned upthread was just born angry. No diagnosis but just a hateful person who wants to make others miserable (he likes animals though apart from one time when he got loads of snails and put a piece of wood on top of them and jumped on it to crush them).

He may not be technically mentally ill but he’s never been and never will be a fully functioning and positive member of society. I don’t know what you define that as, ‘evil’ is too basic a definition.

There is a calculated element of this to his crimes.

The first thing he would have seen at that business place, when he entered the door was a gym right in front of him. If he really was gripped by an overwhelming urge to kill that he couldn't control, BC of psychosis (nb it this different from the term 'psychotic' being used to describe him by posters on here?), he could have run amok in there. But somehow he managed to tamp down his urges and dash up the stairs and round the corner, because, I don't know, maybe a class of 8 year old girls is somehow less likely to fight back and do him some damage rather than a gym with bodybuilders and assorted (male) adults.

Also he carries out this attack 1 week before his 18th birthday. If he'd attempted this after 18 he'd be in for a whole life tarrif.

https://staging-stuartmillersolicitors.kinsta.cloud/how-long-is-a-life-sentence-in-the-uk/

There is this notion that people who are mentally ill are completely unhinged about everything that seems to absolve stuff they seem.to be able to do quite rationally.

I suspect he did this for the effect he knew it would create. Same as with those drama groups he was in, and that infamous doctor who thing. He wanted to be famous.

That Gwen Adshead lecture spent an awful lot of time demonstrating her compassion to offenders who'd committed horrendous acts of violence trying to work out why. She was fond of empathising with them but ultimately it seems like the reason why they were violent was because... They could be. And got away with it until they were prosecuted. 🤷‍♀️