There are some very good threads posted tonight and forgive me if I don't get to every point but feel free to recapitulate if there's something nagging which makes you feel uneasy. I have been accused in the past of simplifying schizophrenia,of not taking on board what the professionals in the field have posted and of having no personal experience of the illness and therefore writing in a vacuum with little or no facts to back up my point of view.
In fact I have read quite a bit on the illness in the past and whilst not suffering from schizophrenia personally I do know someone who was struck with the illness at the age of 17 after a series of stressful examinations. Please don't ask me to elucidate further because I'm not going to,but I will describe a few of her symptoms: dancing outside at a bus stop whilst having no intention of catching a bus,calling a taxi to Manchester Airport and insisting to Passport Control that she board a plane to Germany whilst not in possession of a ticket or a passport,and again whilst off medication quoting the bible in a way any person in the street would realize after two minutes that she was not quite normal.
On medication she was totally normal,you could talk to her just like anyone else and not suspect she was a schizophrenic. There were side-effects to the medication such as hand tremors(fastening taps so tightly the next person to use the sink would have difficulty in unscrewing them)and weight gain.
When I compare this girl to Sheila I think of Ann Eaton's claim that Sheila "couldn't put beans on toast",and Freddi Emani's observation that when Sheila poured a drink she needed two hands to hold the glass and when she used her right hand her left hand moved involuntarily. This would obviously impair Sheila from using a gun were she still under the influence of any anti-psychotic medication,and we have all read the medical report where there were traces of Haloperidol in her liver and cannabis,although Dr. Hugh Ferguson does say the cannabis use would not have impacted on the Haloperidol if I have read it right.
Ah but you may say Sheila was totally off her medication and therefore she would not have been prone to any of the side-effects mentioned above. Her manual dexterity would have been back to normal and let's say for sake of argument that she was able to reload a gun twice and had malice aforethought to plot the ultimate revenge on all in the house that night.
The problem with this scenario is that under the non-influence of any medication whatsoever her mental state reverts to what she had demonstrated and experienced in the past. We know from her ex-husband Colin that she was difficult to live with,that she had put her hand through a pane glass window for whatever reason and had hurled pots and pans around the kitchen though aiming to miss at Colin. Later at the Maida Vale flat her ex-boyfriend Freddi Emani noted her religious mania(I'm not too sure how she was a danger to others when she imagined herself Joan of Arc,and to my mind when Jeremy got wind of this it was the germination of his plot to burn the house down and fittingly burn his sister as Joan was),nor can I see distressing as it might be to the neighbours who wanted a good night's sleep how Sheila howling like a wolf in the night hours was a danger to anyone in the vicinity.
Did she ever threaten to kill anybody,did she ever pick up a kitchen knife and threaten to kill Colin or the boys? Did she ever do this at White House Farm where she stayed for a time after her hospitalization,and would Nevill and June ever have felt safe at night at this stage had she done so?
Of course it's impossible to categorize schizophrenics into one homogeneous group and it would be foolish to do so. But when you look at the tragic cases of Lianne Smith and Melanie Ruddell to name but two there's no real mystery about schizophrenics whatever cohort they belong to medically.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2148064/Melanie-Ruddell-heard-voices-head-just-killed-son-Christy.html#axzz2JyLGoxHdOf course the Jeremy supporters will quote Helen Grimster,and I have no wish to hide any information so I post it here. The only thing I would say is that Sheila comments that she has a better relationship with Colin because of the divorce,so the motive some allege of getting back at him for leaving her or feeling suicidal because they were not back together does not in my opinion stand up.
http://jeremybamberforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=155.0
