Introduction

This chapter will explore a number of mental health inquiries that took place in the early and mid-1990s. It will argue that the media reporting – particularly that in tabloid newspapers – had a key role in undermining support for the progressive elements of community care. This is not to diminish the nature of some of the cases that led to the inquiries. It is, rather, to consider the way that this media reporting helped to construct a discourse around risk and mental health. This reporting played on a series of long standing, often racialised tropes about the nature of mental illness. One of the most important of these was the notion that there is a clear, identifiable and causal link between mental illness and violence. These are complex issues. However, complexity was drowned out by the dominant narrative that the community faced new dangers in the form of ‘psychokillers’. Alongside this, a theme in the reporting of such cases was that liberal mental health professionals were refusing to use their powers to intervene.

Before exploring the role of mental health inquiries in the late 1980s and 1990s, it is important to place inquiries in the broader policy and organisational context of New Public Management (NPM). NPM seeks to bring the so-called disciplines of the market to the public sector. According to Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004), NPM was an attempt to introduce some elements of the market, such as competition, to public services. This is part of a shift that saw the marketisation of the state (Hutton, 1996). Health and welfare services have seen huge changes in the funding and delivery of services since the early 1980s. These have included not only the sale of state assets but also the contracting out of services – for example catering, cleaning and other support services – to private companies. Skelcher (2000) outlined three modern models of the state: the overloaded state of the 1960s/ 1970s; the hollowedout state of the 1980s/ early 1990s; and the congested state of the late 1990s. There is something of a contradiction here as neoliberalism seeks to limit the role of the state to a ‘night watchman role’ but the role of the state has expanded.