CHRISTOPHER Saunders was plainly a vulnerable man. Aged 19, he had the mental age of a 10-year-old.

He is now dead, having hanged himself at Calderstones Hospital, Whalley, where he was locked up more than 300 miles from his home and family.

Such was his mental state that when he appeared before magistrates in May, in his home town of Plymouth in Devon on charges of assault and criminal damage, they decided he was unfit to plead and ordered his detention in a secure hospital.

This was after he had spent three months on remand in Exeter prison despite protests from his family, social workers and lawyers that jail was an inappropriate place for him.

Indeed, prison can hardly have been regarded as a fitting place for a confused person with the mind of a mere child.

But it is absolutely amazing that what the mental health care system regarded as suitable for Christopher Saunders was transferring him hundreds of miles away to strange surroundings and so far away that his family was only able to visit him once a month. Clearly, the distress he suffered as a result - shown by his telephone pleas to his mother to be brought home - was a major factor in him hanging himself.

Yet was not the very decision to send him all that way from his home and family also a cause of his tragic fate?

Who made that choice? And why?

It beggars belief that mental health care provision in this country is now so desperate that a sick, vulnerable teenager, no more than a little boy mentally, has to be shunted from one end of the land to the other before a place can be found for him.

It is hard for such a circumstance to be classed as "care" at all.

And it seems that Christopher Saunders got something far removed from compassion.

His case demands two urgent and open inquiries - one to determine how he was able to hang himself at Calderstones; the other, to establish just why this tragic young man came to be there at all.

Let there be answers - for it would appear that the care in the community policy which closed so many hospitals for the mentally ill and handicapped has turned into an absolute shambles if the closest such facility to Plymouth is up here in Lancashire.

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