by Ian Acheson, Telegraph
Foreign nationals face pressures that drive up the risk of psychosis. It takes only one dangerous person to threaten social cohesion
The “banality of evil” is a phrase that has turned into a cliché. But under the layers of senseless brutality we are now inured to, surely one case still meets that benchmark.
[…] It is the combined impact of migration, legal or otherwise, and the effects of trauma on violent offending. But let’s be clear first about the baselines.
Despite horrendous incidents, England and Wales are not in the grip of an American‑style homicide epidemic. In the year to March 2024, there were 570 homicide victims, around 10 killings per million people. The latest figures show 522 homicide victims in the year ending March 2025, the lowest total in a decade.
Murder remains rare. Nor do foreign-national murderers dominate our prisons: roughly 10,400 foreign‑national offenders are in custody, a serious number but still a minority of the estate.
So the story here is not “migrant killers everywhere”. It is something more uncomfortable: we are bringing into this country a cohort of people we know to be at much higher risk of serious mental disorder – including psychosis and PTSD – and then behaving as if that risk were someone else’s problem until a man walking his dog is bleeding out on a suburban pavement.
The evidence on psychosis is clear, and it has been so for decades. Meta‑analyses of incidence studies show that international migrants and their children have roughly double or triple the risk of schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders compared with the settled host population.