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?

@soupfiend I'm sure sectioning requires danger to other

You said you'd worked children who had done the same or worse?

And what we want to know is data on how many other people there are with profiles like this that haven't done anything terrible yet...or, I don't personally need to know, but I'd like to live under the illusion that someone was looking at this question.

But I agree @soupfiend it's bloody hard - locking people up for carrying knives and having violent thoughts is against the direction of travel that says criminalising people early causes worse outcomes..

As in going on a killing spree? No I didnt

Well, it doesn't.

locking people up for carrying knives and having violent thoughts is against the direction of travel that says criminalising people early causes worse outcomes..

Never mind that! What about the fact that, according to PPs, there are a lot of them? Aggressive antisocial adolescent knife-carrying males.

We can't de-programme them if they haven't got an -ology. We can't cure them if they're not ill. And we can't lock them up for life for carrying a knife on a bus, even if we wanted to, because the numbers would be huge.

I'm not counselling despair: I'm wondering out loud about whether science could pick out the ARs in advance and, if so, what to do next. Chemical cosh? Internment without trial? Androgen blockers?

@Totallymessed danger to self and or others is the requirements

He didn't just have violent thoughts he carried out a pre mediated act of violence.
He was on a bus waving a knife etc

Yep. Do you know how many kids do that. Do you know how many adults do that?

What do you think comes of that?

He wasnt danger to himself, his life was not in danger (and as Ive said there are children who are suicidal who dont get sectioned)

People who are a danger to others, with evidence behind it, are dealt with, or are expected to be dealt with by the criminal justice system. MH practitioners will say its not a MH issue. The police and youth justice wont want to criminalise a child.

No it's not despair but I'd love to know how they're going to solve this - could they have a group you can refer to if you're in any dept / like police, camhs, prevent, cps and you see multiple red flags but each 'incident' doesn't cause your dept to act?

But then, what does that dept do? It does seem circular - nfa from every dept, a game of pass the parcel.

And are we creating many young men without social connections and empathy, and if we are, what are we going to do on the causes and solutions to that...

I, can't go round in circles please Google it.

Out of interest how many CAMHS network meetings have you been to about children like this, how many strategy discussions with police have you attended?

How many children do you work with subject to bail conditions?

How many reintegration meetings have you attended for children excluded for violence?

How many specialist units and placements have you worked with and visited for children with violent behaviour?

@soupfiend what do you think should be done?

Ive already said on this and other threads, the police need different powers, MH needs to be less narrowly defined for detention purposes.

It is not always helpful to aim to keep children out of the criminal justice system, however the research says that overall it is better for overall outcomes, so I am in a minority with that argument.

I think there is too much emphasis on avoiding hospital admission for people with ASD

I dont agree with the ever growing aim of inclusion to mean that children who years ago should and would have been in specialist provision, now need to be in mainstream. That fails the child and the rest of the group in my view where the child's needs are not really being met in mainstream. Some children with SEN can manage in mainstream, Im not talking about them.

However, the system we have is what people have wanted.

So society either accepts that this sort of thing will happen from time to time, similar to other violent children ill, or we accept that we move back to times when people were forcibly removed from society without having done something wrong, or wrong enough to require that sort of detainment.

I mean lets say when he was 14 or so he was put away, for how long, a year, 2 years, 3 years? He would come out at some point. Would he be fixed by then?

Like another poster, I feel in despair that there just isnt a way to deal with this. And while young people like this are not common, neither are they uncommon.

It's not necessarily the fault of society or something in the water. There have always been sociopaths (think of the Hungerford and Dunblane massacres, and all those US school shootings). Maybe we need to step away from the idea that PDs can't be reliably identified in minors, start testing boys from the age of ten, and confine the iffy-er-looking ones to residential schools with ankle tags, tasers, curfews etc.

Just a thought experiment, before you get indignant. But, oh, wouldn't it be peaceful for the rest of us?

(I suspect there'd be some with sufficient self-regulation to avoid detection. But they'll be the ones that, rather than becoming spree killers, become serial killers. Or captains of industry.)

Edited to apologise for sounding flippant. I really want to see solutions.

I don't see why my hard work should keep this evil little shit - hang him and have done with it.

At the moment I happen to be listening on Audible to a book called “This book will change your mind about mental health” by a man who was previously a mental health nurse. What I’ve taken from it is that diagnosis is far from an exact science. A lot seems to depend on what the latest DSM says. Lots of academics, mental health professionals disagree all the time on diagnosis. This author of this book, always refers to schizophrenia as “so-called schizophrenia”.

i heard the judge at the sentencing of the woman who left her 4 children alone who then died in a house fire. He read out all her diagnosed mental health conditions. It was a very long list of “disorders”.

I sometimes wonder how all this is actually helping as for some of these diagnosed conditions there really isn’t much treatment that is guaranteed to be successful.

I don’t know what the answer is but, ultimately the public need to be protected from people who have a propensity for violence which the Southport killer clearly did. I don’t really care which agency deals with it, but as a country we need to do something different, as the current approach is manifesting failing.

@fromthegecko - good post.

If you look at psychopathy and offenders like this, the signs of them meeting a lot of criteria for adults are there.

The moral challenge to say "there is something wrong with this child" and justify it is huge.

You are looking at a very small category of mostly boys. When you look at those men who become the very worst offenders like Brady, Cregan, Sutcliffe, West, people who kill for sadistic gratification, who are never going to be rehabilitated to release, it seems justified.

The challenge is parenting. The state would need power to override parents. Parents will fight to have their children given every chance. Or they may likely be the source of the dysfunction with a violent brute father and a mother who idolises her boy instead.

@soupfiend thanks for saying it again, they're long threads and I probably missed your other posts

I agree with both your statements re inclusion and what would you do after a couple of years when out

How times have changed - not much knife stuff at our school 50 years ago, for instance a boy was shooting pellets at girls back sides at break time, he was taken behind the bike shed by a few older boys and given a good thrashing - those were the days. AR has probably been bullied mercilessly for most of his secondary school life for his weird behaviour and puny stature, most like this just spend their lives in their bedrooms - some decide to take revenge!

Whether he has a mental illness or not, he is an evil * and he should never see the light of day again. There is no excuse to do what he did to those poor children. The children who survived have to live with the horror of what they saw that day. Horrific and he deserves no sympathy at all.

Capital punishment costs the state more than imprisonment does.

Earlier intervention might have prevented him committing this crime, would you be willing to pay for that?

Capital punishment costs the state more than imprisonment does.

Do you mean for one person it's more than 52 years in prison? What's the ballpark for one person?

I have no idea re actual costs but death row inmates in the US are the most expensive. They are entitled to numerous appeals, not regarding their conviction but regarding their sentence. Even the most pro death penalty states cannot execute without due process.

Wish I could “like” this more than once.