The report argues: “Successful care from the patient’s point of view enables him or her to lead as normal a life in the community as possible.”The report calls for a legal power for the compulsory care of mentally disordered people, which would designate a place where the individual is required to live; confirm that a care plan had been agreed by the health and local authorities responsible forproviding care; specify any medical, nursing or rehabilitative treatments, and where it would be delivered; and name the key professional responsible for ensuring that a health care plan was implemented. It would also be a time-linked power, with op p ortunities for the patient to be discharged from the order after a certain period.Explaining the need for a compulsory community care order the authors conclude: “We believe that the broader concept of a comprehensive care plan order … would protect patients’ welfare while they were receiving medication against their wishes. The timehas come to jettison an Act which neither protects the public effectively, nor provides the care which seriously mentally disordered people need to have a more fulfilled and happier life.

There has been a ministerial commitment to a review of mental health law `sooner or later’. We think the review should start now.”The Falling Shadow: One Patient’s Mental Health Care 1978-1993, Duckworth, £12.99.Leading article, page 13. THE sickness Andrew Ross Robinson had a promising start in life. Born in 1957 in Natal, South Africa, where his father, the Rev Peter Robinson, had a parish, he attended a boarding prep school in Pietermaritzburg. When he was 12 the family returned to the UK where, at a Devon boarding school, he passed nine O-levels and three A-levels. According to a psychiatrist it was in his last year at school that Robinson developed his first obsession – with the length of his nose, which he believed repulsed girls.
In October 1976 he started studying economics at Lancaster University and consulted a plastic surgeon in London who operated on his nose.

He was disappointed with the results, became depressed and dropped out of his course.In the summer of 1977 he worked at a camp in France and that October went to St David’s, Lampeter, to study French After two weeks he met a female student. After a brief affair she finished with him, blaming his premature ejaculation.He decided to hurt the woman who had become a symbol of power and evil. In June 1978, after drinking several pints of cider, he stole a shotgun and went to the student’s room with the intention of maiming her or perhaps killing her and then himself. Whenshe opened the door he put the gun to her forehead and pushed her back. She grabbed the barrel and after a scuffle he was disarmed.After being convicted of carrying a firearm with criminal intent and assault Robinson was sent to Broadmoor maximum security hospital where paranoid schizophrenia was diagnosed.In a first prophetic warning the psychiatrist wrote: “I strongly advise a restriction order without limit of time as his illness and potential dangerousness are likely to be long lasting.”Despite that warning Robinson was discharged to a less secure psychiatric hospital. Three years and nine months later he was conditionally discharged.Over the next 13 years Robinson was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, bedsits and his parents’ home near Dartmouth. A cycle developed whereby he would persuade some doctors that he was not dangerous and so they would reduce or stop his medication; th e n his mental state would deteriorate and his parents would appeal for him to be readmitted as he was becoming disturbed and violent.By August 1986 Robinson was becoming increasing obsessed with a woman whom he was convinced had cast a spell on him using occult powers.