Our society has an ambivalent attitude to schizophrenia, as a cursory search of the news for the first half of January 2010 makes abundantly clear.On 12 January, if you read the stuff churned out by showbiz publicists, you could have marvelled at the notion of a certain celebrity admitting to being ‘schizophrenic’. How does he know? Because he would like to keep two careers going – one career acting in films, one career acting on stage.

In contrast, on 14 January you could have been horrified by a news piece about a ‘schizophrenic’ mother who stabbed her daughter to death. On the same day there was also the account of how a ‘schizophrenic’ man attacked and killed his friend, although no doctor’s diagnosis is quoted in the article.

The news hounds on 18 January had a field day with the psychiatric analogies. A band’s musical style is a ‘schizophrenic mix of pop and rock’, while a sports team – which won a match one day and lost a match the next day – is labelled ‘schizophrenic’.

It’s enough to drive you around the bend.

Why the sudden interest in mental health? Because the House of Commons Justice Committee’s report, Cutting crime: the case for justice reinvestment, published on 14 January 2010, reflected on mental health and the need to direct resources towards treating it – rather than, as is the norm now, banging up the mentally ill in prison.

The committee’s report is the latest in a series of reports to urge a change in the way the criminal justice system interacts with the mentally unwell.

There was Lord Bradley’s report, for instance, more of which later. And there was the February 2009 report from the Prison Reform Trust that claimed that 70% of this country’s prison population of 82,240 has two or more mental health disorders. Most of these receive no treatment in prison and many of them quickly re-offend upon release. Society becomes a victim twice over – which is an unsustainable and pointless expense.

A 2009 Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health report concluded that good quality diversion schemes could cut the costs of crime by £20,000 for every person they diverted from a short prison sentence to a community sentence that included mental health treatment.

And now the Justice Committee’s report has concluded much the same. It said the criminal justice system was ‘facing a crisis of sustainability’ and the government should make ‘radical moves’ to shift resources away from incarceration towards rehabilitation and projects that tackle the underlying causes of offending – such as mental health problems.

The report conceded there was ‘understandable public concern that offenders should suffer serious consequences for the crimes they have committed’, but said there was a ‘very strong financial case’ for investing substantial resources in more preventative work with, among others, people with mental ill-health.

The report alluded to Lord Bradley’s review of the treatment of people with mental health problems and his findings that swift action to broaden access to diversion and liaison schemes and to secure hospital treatment ‘could yield short, medium and long-term reductions in the prison population and result in cost savings to the public purse, as well as provide more humane approaches to managing offenders with mental ill-health’.

It would seem an open and shut case then, except legal aid cuts mean fewer and fewer mental health lawyers can afford to continue in practice. Or as Richard Charlton, chairman of the Mental Health Lawyers Association puts it, ‘the fixed fee regime is creating an advice vacuum for mental health work’.

Crazy, isn’t it?