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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • There’s a lot of hate here that I can empathise with and I’m trying to not take calls for her to commit suicide or be murdered/ tortured in prison literally. It’s difficult to express hate verbally without reference to physical violence that underscores it. There’s sentiment here that life in prison isn’t enough and I tend to agree, but not in a way I’ve seen talked about here or anywhere else.

    Letby should be imprisoned for life, no question. But that shouldn’t stop us asking more questions about what happened here. Do we treat Letby’s murders as isolated, unique cases and expect them to never be repeated? Lock her away and continue business as usual? It’s possible that things aren’t so simple and we need to look into how somebody like Letby got away with so much for so long and maybe also why she began doing something quite so horrific.

    Mental illness is an unfortunate reality to come to grips with because we are steadily recognising that it is caused by relationships an affected person has with their environment. That means there is a share of responsibility in all of us and the systems/ institutions we have built to make sure this does not happen again and that we identify it before it’s too late.

    It’s entirely likely that Letby will turn to self harm, or other extreme outcomes of poor mental health. We can’t ask anyone to sympathise with her after what she has done, but we can hope to treat mental illness better in the future and offer help to those who need it, before it’s too late. And I don’t mean too late in the sense of killing people, because that’s not what all mentally ill people do.