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That's the rub though. Chances are he wasn't on the radar for the necessary support services for them to have seen the triggers and intervened. Youth Support Service (ANY kind of support - mental health included) is being cut at a blinding rate. Southwark for example are cutting their funding for youth services by 73% next year. 73%!!!!!! Clearly there are no vulnerable or at risk young people in Southwark any more.
Or they were aware and didn't have the resources to do anything about it.
stevo_com
This highlights one of the persistent issues that we're going to experience frequently where there's an intersection of mental health and people/communities that are vulnerable to extremism and/or isolation from support services.
Access to extremists and extremist materials online is ridiculously easy. Counter that with the kind of judgement that people with mental health issues experience from broader society and it's easy to see why the perceived acceptance from extremist communities isn't just attractive but very compelling.
Looking at the scenario described by badmanlongtime, there's a lot of warnings there that an intervention by support services should have happened before the attack took place. One of the things that is tied up with society's fear and misunderstanding of mental health is that we avoid engaging with problems when we see them. There's a stigma against taking action and at best we hope that someone else will do it and at worst we just hope that it will go away. There's no rationality to the fear of contacting mental health services to report a risk to public or a person's safety and that's something we need to address urgently. If we don't, there will continue to be incidents like this and people only survive a stabbing by luck, never judgement.