Soham murders: 'Rampton Hospital is hardly a holiday camp'

The IoS interview: Mike Harris, psychiatrist

'Welcome to Rampton Hospital Authority. We hope that you enjoy your visit" reads the sign in the reception area near a framed photograph of Diana, Princess of Wales, the patron saint of pariahs.

If she was their patron, then this high security hospital is their refuge. Held behind its walls are rapists, paedophiles and child killers, sent here in the hope that psychiatrists can treat their perverted minds.

As the director of forensic services, Dr Mike Harris is the man who ensures these patients have the best chance of reclaiming their sanity and even, perhaps, being accepted again into society.

However, the obsessive public focus on Rampton's latest patient Ian Huntley, currently charged with the murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, has been an unwelcome distraction.

"You have two people [Ian Huntley and his fiancee Maxine Carr] who according to the British standard of justice are innocent because they have not been tried and found guilty, but you've got the public baying after them," says Dr Harris.

It has been a stressful week for staff at Rampton. At one point the interest in Huntley became so frenzied that Dr Harris had to commission more security fences.This was not to keep patients in, but to keep the media and members of the public out.

Then, on Thursday, he received a death threat from an anonymous caller. Death threats do not worry him – for 10 years he was plagued by a nuisance caller, until his wife got fed up and switched their home phone number with the fax. The calls stopped.

But he is concerned about the negative impact a case such as that of the Soham murders has on his staff and those patients suffering from severe personality disorders.

Patients at Rampton tend to fall into three main categories – those with personality disorders, the mentally ill and the learning disabled. The majority are mentally ill, for example manic depressives. The severely disturbed represent a tiny fraction of the patients.

The common link is that nearly everyone sent here has committed a crime. Yet the regime is different from that in a mainstream prison. Here, a typical day could involve art therapy or a session with a psychiatrist.

In the wake of the Soham murders, certain sections of the media have branded Rampton a "holiday camp". However, Dr Harris argues that having people "messing around with your brain" is not a soft option.

"If you are a sex offender you don't want to talk about it, if you have killed someone you don't want to talk about it. The comfortable thing is to pretend it never happened. If you come here you have to talk about things and that's pretty painful," says Dr Harris, who has more than 13 years experience as a psychiatrist.

"All this about us being a holiday camp is so destructive – what does that say about mental illness, that it's a soft option?"

In his opinion, treating the underlying aggression of people with severe personality disorders with a combination of drugs and therapy is the only way to protect the public.

"Maybe we should worry more about our prison system, where we now incarcerate more and more people who receive no treatment and come out just as dangerous as they went in," he says.

His work may involve dealing with extreme cases, but Dr Harris is quick to point out that mental illness can affect anyone. He reels off a sobering list of statistics – one person in four will consult their family doctor about a psychiatric problem, one in 10 will see a psychiatrist, one in 20 will have a psychiatric admission, one in 100 will have schizophrenia or a manic depressive psychosis.

"Cancer once had the same stigma until Richard Dimbleby [the broadcaster] publicly said he was dying of cancer," he says.

"People are frightened they will get it [mental illness]. They are frightened it's catching. I think our politicians could help if they were perhaps more honest about themselves, about who has had mental illnesses – and a lot of them have. Maybe if Rupert Murdoch's mother had been in a psychiatric hospital there would be less of the bullshit."

As Dr Harris points out, the insane appear as ordinary as the sane. "If you met some of our patients you would realise how ordinary they are. People don't like hearing it, but it could be my family, someone else's aunt or uncle," he says.

"When the public are out there baying for blood, they should think about who they are baying for. It could be their kids or friends or relatives."

Biography

* Forensic psychiatrist and general psychiatrist in Nottingham

* Medical director at St Andrew's Hospital, Northampton for five-and-a-half years

* On Nottinghamshire Probation Committee; chaired Nottingham Mind for several years

* Sat on Rampton Hospital Advisory Committee

* Currently an Executive Board member on Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust