Doctor Zanalda, what happens in these cases and what can we say to the public to help them interpret cases that cause such concern?
«Unlike what one might think, filicides are not mostly committed by people who are being treated for their mental state, indeed in 72% of cases those who commit them are healthy people, or in any case who have not attracted the attention of social services. It is natural that it is more difficult to accept that they can happen even in situations in which that attention was present: in these cases what is at stake above all is the evaluation of parental capacity, which in a person with a mental disorder is perhaps a little attenuated, but not excluded a priori. There is certainly a difficulty in predicting these behaviors because they are actually difficult to predict, then sometimes there can also be a lack of following these people correctly, but I believe that the problem lies more in the difficulty of predicting.”
When it comes to parents and mothers, we often hear that these terrible acts are committed in fear of losing custody of their children forever. Is this plausible?
“Yes. Separation is a very delicate moment for the couple and some more fragile people can experience it very badly and, without ever having been in treatment, behave in absolutely inappropriate ways. We should be able to intercept the delicate moments in people’s lives in which fragilities can emerge. An all-round work would be needed in terms of relationships, with education, with prevention, on society as a whole, not just on the sick.”
Can you explain what the social danger mentioned in the case of the Milan stabbing is and how is it assessed?
«Social dangerousness is a legal concept for which a court requires an expert to evaluate a person who has had a defect of mind, and who has committed a crime in the past connected to his altered mental state – and who therefore has had a recognized attenuated capacity or inability to understand and want according to articles 88 and 89 of the penal code -, to understand if and how dangerous he remains over time. This is a very difficult assessment to make, because social danger is not an indelible mark destined to remain constant, but something dynamic that can change and even attenuate over time. Let’s think about the case of the stabbing in Milan, it involved a man who had a semi-mental infirmity, for which he had served his sentence and then underwent treatment in a Rems, at the end of which he was judged no longer socially dangerous, unfortunately, instead, he returned to commit a crime similar to the one he had already committed. But it’s not the rule, in most cases this doesn’t happen, even if obviously we don’t know about it because the positive results don’t make the news. Then it must be said that in reality people with poor mental health do not commit more crimes than healthy people.”
In these cases, however, the social instinct to ask to go back, to return to confinement, to protect others is natural. Is this an understandable temptation?
«Understandable yes, but in my opinion not very useful as well as humanly expensive: I said before that the vast majority of filicides are committed by people who do not have or are not known to have mental disorders, locking up those who do would not protect them from others and in the meantime would mean locking up mostly people who are not dangerous, to their detriment. Also because it is perhaps not so much the pathology itself that influences these violent behaviors as the set of situations: the occasion, the environment and the character of the people which can complicate and make prediction very difficult. So I say: no, we don’t need to go back, we certainly need to improve as much as possible in providing indicators that can somehow help intercept danger signals, knowing however that we will always have a component of the imponderable and we will never be able to predict everything.”
Mental health support is also an issue of resources, we repeat that the blanket is always short. Is there this problem?
«It’s one of the things we’ve been saying for years, certainly the services should be more extensive, but specifically I don’t see so much a problem of resources, but of difficulty in forecasting. Even in countries where there is a greater investment, perhaps even in those where mental hospitals are open with their human costs, these things still happen.”
