When is it appropriate to schedule someone into compulsory care when he or she is out of touch with reality? The horrific attack at a busy and normally safe Sydney shopping mall will renew this conversation. That is my prediction, before the formal investigation and review procedures have concluded – and I admit to ignorance on the details of the assailant, now deceased.

However, there was one line in the reporting that immediately brought this question to mind, and that was the person who set about knifing shoppers had ‘a history of schizophrenia’.