M ental I llness C oncerns A ll	Horrocks ( PH ) even without schizophrenia had no real chance of making it. A sundered childhood, in a Home aged nine because too difficult at home, later at odds with his step family and maybe particularly with his stepfather who arrived when he was ten, there were suspicions of non-accidental injury, which were never cleared up. In Care for three years in his early teens, he leaves school without qualifications, goes to reside with his grandmother. He soon loses an apprenticeship in welding. He is early involved with others in crime, prodding an old lady with a stick in the proces of burglary, and unlike the others with him, receiving a severe prison sentence for that, when she subsequently died. Released from prison aged twenty-two the first aggressive expression of his schizophrenia illness is when he attacks his stepfather, mother and their child, whilst telling his stepfather there has been a tag implanted after the stepfather had been with prostitutes. The Court require a psychiatric opinion when he is charged with that assault. A forensic psychiatrist recommends a hospital detention order. He improves on oral medication against schizophrenia, but never sufficiently to become independent. Depot regimes are considered but are never implemented. He will not have them. He is well supervised by his first consultant psychiatrist and social worker, and moves to a hostel and attendance at a day centre. He threatens someone with a knife when they enter his room. After that Consultant leaves her post, successive clinical leads never gain charge. The social worker struggles on to provide some structure and future for him, but when she leaves as well , the disorganised, poorly managed, fragmented mental health service in the catchment area never finds adequate leadership, or a coherent engagement by anyone who can draw in a team review to bring about a working care plan. When he moves into his own accommodation, he lapses from regular medication and five months after that, moving in a girl friend, they are quarrelling and he beats her to death. Review	E-mail reaction is welcome mica@didgy.freeserve.co.uk