Oh, as if JB had only watched that programme so long after it aired!
I bet he was glued to the TV an hour before it began.
By the way, insanity and psychopathy are two different things.
According to this article
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/dec/01/yorkshire-ripper-peter-sutcliffe-mental-health-1981-trial the ‘
Jury in 1981 rejected truth of Sutcliffe’s account to psychiatrists that a divine voice had told him to kill prostitutes“It has always been a key feature of the Yorkshire Ripper case that although the jury at his trial found Peter Sutcliffe sane at the time that he murdered 13 women, the psychiatrists diagnosed him as having paranoid schizophrenia.
The sole issue at his trial in 1981 was whether or not his responsibility for the killings was diminished by mental abnormality. The announcement by clinicians that he no longer requires hospital treatment, and that he could now be sent back to prison, revives that original issue.
The three psychiatrists called in his defence, Dr Milne, Dr McCullogh and Dr Kay, each diagnosed that he had “encapsulated (or hidden) paranoid schizophrenia” based on his account that a divine voice had told him in 1967 while he was working as a gravedigger that it was his mission to kill or eradicate prostitutes.
By its verdict the trial jury rejected, on the balance of probabilities, the truth of the account Sutcliffe had given to the psychiatrists and he was given a life sentence of at least 30 years, which he started at Parkhurst maximum security prison.
After being repeatedly attacked in the hospital wing of Parkhurst, his diagnosis as a paranoid schizophrenic was confirmed and he was transferred to Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital in 1984.
For nine years Sutcliffe refused any treatment, until 1993 when the Mental Health Commission ordered that he should be forcibly treated. The only hard information in the public domain about his progress was given by Dr Kevin Murray, Broadmoor’s clinical director, in a 2010 court of appeal hearing which upheld Sutcliffe’s whole-life sentence for the campaign of murder which had terrorised a large part of Yorkshire for several years.
Murray’s report revealed that in July 1993 Sutcliffe was started on anti-psychotic medicine and had persevered with it ever since. He said Sutcliffe had been the subject of three assaults, including one in which he lost his right eye.
“In the opinion of Dr Murray and his colleagues, he suffers from a chronic treatable mental illness for which he has been willing to accept appropriate treatment, which has successfully contained it for many years,” reported the court of appeal judge, Mr Justice Mitting.
The mental health tribunal endorsed this view in July 2010 when it found that his treatment had produced “complete remission of his positive symptoms”, and said his mental health would likely suffer if he were returned to prison. The tribunal ruling underlined the sharp difference of view between those psychiatrists who assessed Sutcliffe and the jury’s original verdict.
Brian Dow, of the charity Rethink Mental Illness, said: “There’s no cure as such. There’s no medication that will make it go away, but people will often be able to manage their symptoms to a point where they can lead a very normal life.
“Presumably ... he is sufficiently well that he no longer needs to be treated in a clinical setting. That’s very possible as the treatments he may have had may have got him to a point where they deem him to be able to be incarcerated in a prison rather than a high-security ward.”
