Any healthcare system can be afflicted by wrong diagnoses of a patients medical condition, medicine is a science but it is a science that sometimes needs an awful lot of human interpretation. A decent healthcare system should have in place systems that make wrong diagonses a minimal problem and also systems that allow a timely correction when a wrong diagnoses is found or is suspected.

However the UK’s National Health System (NHS) is not that sort of decent system and paid out over half a billion pounds in compensation to patients who had been misdiagnosed in some way between 2016 and 2019. Sometimes these misdiagnoses mean that a person will get treatment later on in the progression of their illness or may even have been treated with inappropriate drugs or surgery. Too often these misdiagnoses are the avoidable outcomes of having a Stalinist healthcare system where there is very little incentive in the way of market pressure for the NHS to reduce the number of wrong diagnoses that occur. Whilst misdiagnoses are not something confined to crap state run healthcare systems, it’s possible that such errors are much more likely in systems that are mired in bureaucracy and which are like the NHS appallingly managed.

There are families up and down the UK who have to live with the consequences of NHS screw ups when it comes to diagnosis of illnesses. There are mothers and fathers, siblings and children who have all been lost or have suffered terrible disabilities because of poor treatment and poor diagnostic practises by the NHS.

But it’s not just the medical and surgical parts of the NHS that screw up royally. The NHS’s Mental Health sector does seem to be, from talking to those who have used it and reading about it, even worse than the regular NHS. Like the rest of the NHS their mental health services fail their patients, their families and society and we’ve recently seen the story of how a misdiagnosis of a patients mental health condition meant that this person’s actual condition wasn’t treated and the patient went on to kill his own mother.

The Daily Mail said:

A 23-year-old son stabbed his beloved mother to death in a horrific knife attack after his deteriorating mental health was misdiagnosed as autism. 

Alan Williams, who was in fact suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, had the delusional fear his mother Lorraine Cullen, 43, intended to harm his eight-year-old sister.

Williams then brutally attacked her with two or three knives in the living room of her home in Huyton, Liverpool on the night of May 10, 2022. 

The 23-year-old was detained under the Mental Health Act and has been held in a high-security in-patient hospital since the killing. 

Williams’s treating forensic psychiatrist Dr Melanie Higgins told Liverpool Crown Court on Monday his diagnosis of autism three years earlier ‘was a catastrophic misdiagnosis’. 

She said the mistake lead to multiple missed opportunities to treat his paranoid schizophrenia that he had been suffering from for a number of years. 

n 2021 Williams was admitted to the Coniston ward at Whiston Hospital near St Helens. 

However Dr Higgins stated in court: ‘Despite noting multiple bizarre behaviours, and concerns raised by the family, no diagnosis is made, other than the diagnosis of autism being taken as fact, and no treatment is offered, although a recommendation is made that he be followed up by the Early Intervention Team.’

She added: ‘They (the family) were mocked for trying to get him help. It was very poor clinical care indeed.’

Williams admitted attacking his mother with whom he had been very close when he was deemed fit for interview.  

Prosecutor Richard Pratt KC said: ‘He said that he believed his mother was intending to kill his sister, either by drowning in her bath or ‘snapping her neck’.

‘He accepted in interview that his beliefs were delusional.’

The report said that Alan Williams pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty of Manslaughter due to diminished responsibility and was ordered to be detained in a mental hospital.

This is truly an appalling case of medical neglect, negligence and NHS staff arrogance as well as the usual dismissal of concerns of family members that we’ve got all too used to when it comes to the NHS. At a time when the family of Williams needed decent, timely and competent help from the NHS they got mockery and a completely wrong diagnosis of Alan Williams’s condition.

I know that sometimes diagnosing mental health conditions can be difficult as such diagnoses do require medical staff to use their judgement to interpret the symptoms and match the symptoms to a particular mental health condition. But it is incredible that the NHS would mistake symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia for something like Autism.

An innocent woman is now dead and a man is now detained in a hospital for the foreseeable future because the NHS screwed up. Neither Autism nor paranoid schizophrenia are unusual or rare or difficult to discern conditions and it’s clear that the NHS really should have done better here.

This is a frightening and tragic case and it makes me wonder just how many other mental health misdiagnoses the NHS has made. There could be many others whose condition has not been either properly diagnosed or treated and who, like Alan Williams, might be left to spiral down into abject distress and left in positions where they harm themselves or others.

The NHS is a shitshow and now that we have a government that worships the NHS it is a situation that is unlikely to change any time soon.