The Whitechapel murders of 1888 attributed to Jack the Ripper were, like many of the crimes of multiple-victim killers, well-publicised, bizarre and dramatic (Lunde & Sigal, 1990). Although in the public mind at the time the murders of at least seven women in and around the Whitechapel district of London's East End were believed to have been carried out by Jack the Ripper. However, according to police and forensic evidence his victims, all prostitutes, numbered only five, beginning with Mary Ann Nichols, found murdered on 31 August 1888, and ending with Mary Jane Kelly, whose mutilated body was discovered on 9 November 1888.

As we have previously mentioned, the computer itself is simply a collection of chips and circuit boards which are useless without software. Application software is what you do work with, i.e. your word processor or database etc, but the application software itself needs an operating system to run within. The operating system, however, needs something called a basic input/output system (BIOS) to operate. This is software but stored in ROM (Read Only Memory) on chips, and tells the computer what to do when it is first switched on.

In this paper I describe my experience of restructuring psychiatric services after the Iraqi invasion. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find words to describe the frustration, bitterness, sorrow and disappointment in seeing the collapse of a service that had been built up by the strenuous efforts of psychiatrists.

The optimal system for delivering forensic psychiatric care has yet to be established. At an early stage, Gunn (1977) drew attention to the differing models of a ‘parallel’ service and an ‘integrated’ approach. Only with the integrated system do forensic patients pass to ordinary NHS facilities when they no longer require security or other specialist expertise. The debate can be extended into whether forensic services should be provided by regional units, by district services, or by a mixture of both. Indeed, the Royal College of Psychiatrists (1988) recognised that in addition to a regional service led by a fully trained forensic psychiatrist, secure care can be provided at a district level by consultants who have sufficient training to hold posts with a special responsibility. Furthermore, managers are understandably keen for as much as possible to be provided by their own district services.