Jayne takes him in her arms when Lynne goes off to find something, but only in the way she would with a close friend’s child.More than 500 children have so far been born through surrogacy in the UK, and it is more respectable than it was 20 years ago when Kim Cotton gave birth to the UK’s first surrogate baby. Friends suspected a primeval maternal instinct for a baby to whom Jayne was, after all, the biological mother might scupper the surrogacy arrangement. But Jayne was always sure everything would be fine.She was right It’s Lynne’s kitchen she is showing the pictures in. Jayne adores her own children – the three that followed Abigail were conceived naturally when Jayne’s fertility spontaneously recovered after more than a decade of unsuccessful medical treatment. In the kitchen of a detached house in an Oxfordshire village, Jayne Frankland, 39, produces a little leather-bound photo album containing a clutch of pictures of the baby boy she gave birth to four months ago The photos show a happy but unusual birth scene.

The photos show a happy but unusual birth scene.
Baby Isaac, born a bouncing 8lb 12ozs, is lying sweetly in his hospital cot. By contrast, cardiovascular disease causes 10.3 per cent of all disabilities, and cancer just 5.3 per cent. These figures fly in the face of the current preoccupations of Government and the press, which in turn raises the question of which of the players involved in these scandals really needs their head examined.Dr Raj Persaud is Gresham professor for public understanding of psychiatry and a consultant psychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. His best-selling book, ‘The Motivated Mind’, is now available from Bantam (£12.99). Lynne and her accountant husband, Richard, took Isaac home as part of their family.By having Isaac – created using Jayne’s eggs and Richard’s sperm – for Lynne, Jayne became the first woman in the UK to have had a baby through a surrogate and then gone on to become a surrogate for someone else.Despite her passionate belief in an infertility solution that produced her first child, Abigail, now eight, Jayne’s friends worried that when it came to it, she would find very upsetting to hand Isaac over to Lynne.

Jayne is behind him with her husband, Mark, and their four young children. In their midst is a beaming Lynne Sonley, the woman the midwife handed Isaac to the moment he was born. This in turn can only happen when the press devotes more space to the perennial scandal of the generally poor quality of treatment available to the mentally ill, rather than displaying an interest in psychiatry only when lurid headlines involving cannibalism are involved.The World Health Organisation recently calculated that mental disorders represent 11.6 per cent of disabilities worldwide. As a result, the relatively meagre resources available are focused on those patients that pose the greatest threat to the public. Munro and Rumgay’s results suggest that if we want to see fewer headlines linking mental illness to extreme violence, the media has to put pressure on the Government to provide better general psychiatric care.

Even those fitting this category do not always show imminent signs that they are about to be aggressive; and there are a substantial group of people who display none of the accepted indicators of violence before committing homicide.Concern for public safety has been taking political precedence over concern for the general welfare of those suffering from mental disorders. Norman would have been spared the further deterioration that occurred, his symptoms would have been more easily resolved, his family would have been spared the burden of coping with him in his ill state, and the attack on Mrs M would never have occurred.”The LSE study found that Dunn’s mother and sister had attempted to raise their concerns about him at a case review meeting, but felt that they were not taken seriously They became so upset that they left abruptly. “After a surprised silence,” the reports says, “discussion resumed as if nothing had happened.” It was decided that Dunn was coping with minimal support and should be discharged from supervision.Munro and Rumgay conclude that more murders could be prevented by improving the response to patients who start to relapse, regardless of their assessed potential for violence. But it also states that 17 other deaths could have been avoided if professionals had responded more readily to signs that patients were relapsing, despite the fact that, on the occasion in question, they gave no clear signs that their illness would include violence.Munro and Rumgay’s findings reveal that those showing signs that they may be dangerous over a long period are only a subsection of those who are eventually violent. They claim that this is more effective than trying to identify high-risk patients and targeting resources on them.According to the survey, improved risk assessment would have identified 11 of the 40 cases, and murders could have been prevented in nine of them. This certainly fits with the priority given in Britain to examining each case in depth, contrasting with the USA, which has a substantially higher murder rate and where homicides by the mentally disordered receive little official study.The way to protect the public is simply to provide better psychiatric care.