Mental Illness and Mass Murder
For the last three years, I’ve been trying to find a publisher for a book about the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and the destructive effects on our society that it has caused. I keep getting told that no one is interested in the topic. The tragedy in Tucson on Saturday — like dozens of other such incidents over the last three decades involving mentally ill persons who made headlines — is the reason that people should be interested. Watching the YouTube videos the shooter made and reading news accounts of his odd behavior leaves no doubt in my mind that the final diagnosis will be paranoid schizophrenia. (I have an older brother who suffered a schizophrenic breakdown in the 1970s. He has never recovered.)
When I was young, random acts of mass murder were shocking. In 1966, Charles Whitman went to the top of a building at the University of Texas and methodically murdered 13 people with a rifle. Such crimes were largely unthinkable until 1984, when James Huberty went into a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California, and murdered 19 people with a shotgun and an Uzi.
We are not shocked anymore. We are saddened — but the days when gun control advocates could dance in the blood of victims to get another useless gun control law passed are over. Americans are now used to this — and that is the biggest tragedy of all. We just accept this, and don’t ask, “What’s causing this? Can we fix it?”
It is not just Americans who are sitting on the sidelines wondering what happened. In spite of much more restrictive gun control laws in Europe, they have a lot of these mass murders over there also. In Finland. In Germany. In Britain. Of course, since these countries have somewhat restrictive to very restrictive gun control laws, the correct response to laws that did not work is … more of the same.
What changed? Our mental health system is what changed — a movement towards emptying out mental hospitals and making it difficult to commit someone against his will. This is called deinstitutionalization. This is an idea so theoretically elegant that it has been taking place everywhere. In America. In Canada. In Britain. In Finland (which has experienced one of the most rapid movements towards deinstitutionalization in the Western world). And probably in those other European countries as well.
I agree the mental health system has changed. You could reasonably ask who is irrational? Judges and lawyers or mental patients? I would say it is the legal system. How can you expect a person with fairly serious mental problem to take medications on a regular basis? A fairly large percentage of homeless people should probably be in a hospital. Many of them prefer to self medicate with street drugs or booze. It is not irrational to keep a mentally sick person in a hospital against that person’s will. Why? Because a mentally ill person be definition cannot make a rational decision.
I don’t want to comment on this current situation because there has been more noise than fact and more emotional hand wringing that ration though already.
Perhaps the politicians should follow your heed. They (media and left politicians) are blaming everyone, Palin, thought of repealing obamacare bill, Rush, Beck.
They have no facts…strictly speculation…but no one calls them on their lack of provable, immediately provable facts. They have NO idea what Jared was thinking or what motivated him on this day. He has had a problem with Gifford since 2007
There should be a law that these crappy politicinas and pundints cannot go on the public airwaves and say things they have no facts to back up. FActs!!! the missing ingredient in our news..
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And the news….my heck..the speculation..well this might now happen, or that, or what if blabblahblah… This is a tragedy, but the world still turns and the sun still comes up. speculaionspecualationspeculation
May Gifford’s recovery be speedy and full.
When I was in med school (in the 1960s), we had a field trip to a New York State psychiatric hospital, of which there were many at the time, housing many thousands of mentally ill patients. While the patients there (emphatically not “inmates”) were manifestly off the rails, they were clean, warm and dry, comfortably clothed, and well nourished. Many were confined there by mandate, and were no risk to society if violent – and obviously, they were not allowed to purchase firearms.
Just a few years later, at the behest of progressive thinkers mouthing lofty utopian ideals, these hospitals had been closed. Their patients were dumped onto the streets, where they slept, wet and freezing, in doorways and cardboard boxes, while panhandling – sometimes threateningly. A pedestrian was greeted on the streets by shabbily dressed, disheveled and dirty thugs mouthing word-salad, demanding the wherewithal to buy something to eat – or to drink. Some even learned that a violent attack on an innocent citizen would get them a brief trip to the county jail, where they could shower, shave, get clean clothes and some good food, and even a psychiatric evaluation, just like the old days….
Most mentally ill patients can be helped with medications, but few will voluntarily use them, due to the side effects, and to their disbelief in their own illness – to them, we are the “crazy” persons, and for some of them, we become the enemy who must be killed.
With appropriate safeguards to protect individual rights, the mental hospital system would be far better for the afflicted, and for society, than our present policy of deliberate and callous neglect, except when they demand our attention in some tragic way.
This happened within a mile of my home in 98. A guy whose family had tried to have committed got on a bus with a bucket of gasoline and then poured it on a couple he didn’t know and then set them on fire. They were burned horrifically, and everyone else on the bus was injured. The toll was not higher because few people ride the bus.
http://www.surroundedbyreality.com/Misc/Fires/Metro.asp
I am sure there are a load of similar stories.
Progressive compassion in action.
I keep hearing all of these interviews on TV on how crazy this shooter was and how strange he behaved. Yet nobody did anything about it, he was left alone in our society, AND he was able to purchase a gun without any problem. People today seem to be afraid of so many mentally unbalanced people, yet we do nothing about it and say nothing about it. I get worried this will only get worse, because more of these nuts will want their 15 minutes of fame by shooting some public figure or a large group of people. Same with the Virginia Tech Killer. He seemed clearly unbalanced to the other people in school, yet nobody did anything about it. But he wanted to go out with a “bang,” and he sure did. Perhaps Michelle Obama should spend more time arguing for more funds for the mentally ill, rather than rant on about obesity. As far as I can tell, a hamburger never shot and killed six people and wounded twelve others.
1) We don’t know when he bought the gun. Could have been before his mental illness took real hold. And even mentally ill people can appear rational for a time, so that there would be no warning sign for a gun seller.
2) There is no “approved” list for buying guns, nor should there be. At most, a “disapproved” list for those how have been judged mentally ill. And generally, those folks should be in an institution. Put where they aren’t danger to themselves or others.
RBJ, I agree totally that there should be no “approved” list for buying a gun, but there certainly should be a list of people in gun shops who are deemed mentally ill by state or federal officials. My point was, had more people taken an interest in this kid and raised some warning flags with the police, maybe something would have been done about it. Maybe he would have been examined by some doctors and found to be mentally ill, thereby qualifying him to be on that important list in the gun shop. And mental illness just doesn’t come over people in a day or two. This guy seems to have acted strange for years, so the warning signs to do something were there for a while.
It just seems that mental illness never seems to be a hot topic in Washington. But something easy, like obesity, gets the ear of people like Michelle Obama. It’s a lot easier to take a cheeseburger away from people rather than prevent a madman from getting a gun. So the celebrities deal with the easy topics rather than the hard ones with few easy answers.
Jared Loughner’s behavior was bizarre enough that when he went to buy ammo the day of the shooting at a local Wal-Mart the clerk went back and waited a few minutes and then came back and lied to Loughner and told him he was out of the ammo he wanted so Loughner ended up going to a different Wal-Mart where he finally got the ammo. Too bad the other clerk wasn’t as discerning.
He bought ammo just before the murders. One Wal-Mart employee was so scared of him that he lied and told him they were out of that caliber. He went and bought it somewhere else.
One of today’s news accounts indicates that he bought the handgun quite recently, after he was showing signs of instability.
Clayton, there are reports that the Pima County Sheriff’s office had had MULTIPLE contacts with this guy for quite some time. he had been making death threats to numerous people and the sheriff’s office had convinced everyone not to file charges because “it would just make things worse” and that he was being “well managed” by the mental health authorities, and that his mother worked for the Pima County Parks and Rec. Dept.. of the excuses that gave, I suspect that the last one was the real reason nothing was done.
Dupnik’s smokescreen about right wing hate was nothing but a CYA.
http://thechollajumps.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/jared-loughner-is-a-product-of-sheriff-dupniks-office/
rbj raises a good point. There should be “…a “disapproved” list for those how have been judged mentally ill.” If two shrinks diagnose someone as unfit to bear arms for a year then we will all be safer.
There is. Any gun dealer is required by federal law to call into a database before selling a gun. Martha Stewart is on that list now (as a convicted felon), but Loughner wasn’t. Apparently he had no serious criminal record, and there were no recent psychological evaluations of him. Schizophrenia usually arises in the teens or twenties, and apparently for Loughner it started after high school.
It sounds like his recent behavior indicated the need for such an evaluation – but due to family influence the sheriff’s department didn’t respond to reports of it. It’s also by no means certain that a few interviews with a psychologist would have identified Loughner as seriously mentally ill and dangerous. Paranoid schizophrenics do have lucid intervals, and may also learn to avoid weird babbling around cops, psychiatrists, etc. So it’s quite possible that the cops talked to Loughner and reasonably thought that there was nothing to the reports about him.
It’s even worse with sociopaths/psychopaths, who are far more dangerous in the long run. (E.g., if Loughner had been a psychopath, he would have had an escape plan, and likely would have got away to strike again.) Psychopaths will turn on the charm when in sight of an authority figure. A guy I went to school with later murdered someone, pled insanity, was eventually released, and murdered five more. He was a vicious bully plus something extra, and none of his classmates were much surprised when he was linked to a mass murder, but the teachers and administrators never had a clue.
You can ID some of the crazies and get them in the federal database as banned from buying guns, but you will never identify them all, nor insure that banned people don’t steal guns or buy them from fences. The best defense in the end is to have honest, sane, and responsible people around with concealed guns.
Everything I’ve makes this guy sound like a real asshole punk – not mentally ill.
What exactly is the difference?
If we as the public are willing to admit that there is insanity (a word that covers much ground and many levels), then we also have to at least consider when we as the public abandon the ‘right’ to just declare when someone is nuts, evil, or just an ‘asshole.’ Imagine someone on trial for a horrible crime, with the death penalty on the table. That guy may or may not die in the chair based entirely on how a few folks on the jury interpret that. If we use these ideas (crazy, evil, etc.) as the standards for prosecution and punishment, we HAVE to be able to define and quantify them. As imperfect as psychiatry is, it is still the best method our society has yet found to determine that.
It makes me really uncomfortable to think that determining who gets locked up, who gets executed, and who wanders the street seems largley to be up to people who simply make an off the cuff declaration that “the guy is just an asshole punk, not mentally ill.” I am not qualified to make that determination, and neither (I suspect) is almost anyone reading this. Please note I am not suggesting leniency or any specific course of action – I’m just pointing out a real problem. This kind of thing requires thoughtful and careful decision making. Snap judgments are usually wrong. In this case, I think we can safely say without more info that the shooter was obviously ‘broken’ in some way. I have no idea what we should do with that, or how we can sensibly act to prevent more of this kind of thing. Whatever we DO decide to do, let’s have some good reasons for it before we do it. Gut instinct ain’t enough.
Sure you are qualified. I was obviously making a slightly sarcastic remark based on the nonsense I get from the news. However, if we were selected to sit on the jury and judge him, I’m sure we decide if he really is insane or just an asshole. Being judgemental is part of being an adult.
I’m not too worried about having a man who is actually criminally insane, judged to be sane and executed? We put down mad dogs humanely – what’s the difference?
That’s always been something that bothered me. My religion all but forbids the death penalty, and I see that the state has enough trouble using it fairly to not want to ever be in the position of a jury member on a capital case. I don’t OPPOSE the death penalty, but I’m not a fan. Still, you’ll never find me outside a prison at a candlelight vigil. If it were up to me, we’d get rid of it, but I’m willing to accept that the majority of my countrymen want to keep it.
In many murder trials we have the defense of insanity. The shrinks are asked to give their expert opinion. Why do we wait until after the crime? Why not ask the shrinks to give their expert opinion when (or before) the madman applies for a gun licence? Why do we give gun licenses to madmen? Why not say that society has legitimate reasons to protect itself from madmen? The constitution amendment allows the people to bear arms, but does anyone in their right mind think that the original proposers and approvers of that law believed that madmen were included? Did the original voters want madmen to bear arms? You do not need to be a historian to see the truth. We all know that in those days madmen were excluded from polite society much more than now. Any one with common sense or common decency can see that the right to bear arms should exclude madmen. It is insane to say otherwise.
Libertyship46, without the commitment judgment, there is no legal way to ban a firearm purchase. That’s in part what Clayton is discussing.
But that was my point, more of these people should be committed but are not. Most of the times we see them, we hear them, and they don’t even hide their strange behavior, yet nobody does anything about it. Our laws now make it even harder to get these people into an institution, not that the institutions are that great either. Had some more people sworn out a complaint against this guy, or had the teachers in college officially notified authorities that he seemed dangerous, maybe somebody would have done something about it. But, with litigation being what it is today, could you imagine the law suits that would take place if you tried to have someone committed and they were, in fact, sane? Maybe that’s why we should be spending more time and money on the subject of mental illness, rather than how many cupcakes kids are eating.
My husband worked in the prosecutors office and was on call for off hour warrants. The police called numerous times about a mental ill man whom they found walking out on the express way and they had arrest him and bring him to the psych hospital for admission. At that time all they need was for him to be a danger to himself or someone else for admission. The Dr kept saying he was fine and would release him and he would go right back to the express way. My husband told the police to take him back to the hospital and handcuff him to a door and leave.
As a student nurse 40 years ago while in a training program at a local mental hospital there were two psychiatrists that committed suicide over a six week peroid, children in the adult wards andI could go on and on but basically there is no mental health system left and what is there is a mess as the lunatics are running the asylum.
Well I only disagree on one point with regard to this article. I work in the legal profession, I am a surety agent and bounty hunter. I assure you that many of the mentally ill are still institutionalized. Only today, we call it prison. And let me tell you from first hand experience, the mentally ill are treated horrifically by both law enforcement and their fellow inmates.
But at least the progressives can feel good and after all that is what is important.
Thanks
You are correct that many are now in prisons, not hospitals–although only after they have committed very serious crimes. The book I’ve written references Bernard Harcourt’s work that demonstrates that total institutionalization rate (prison plus mental hospitals) correlates extremely well with murder rates for the period 1928-2000. As mental hospitals were emptied, murder rates rose. As prison populations rose, murder rates fell.
Prisons are not only more brutal to the mentally ill than mental hospitals, they are also more expensive.
It was not just progressives responsible for this disaster. Lots of good intentioned people, across the political spectrum, were lured in by this beautiful theory.
Mr. Clayton:
You note that the mentally ill are placed in prisons only after conviction for major crimes, and you are right. However, you may be overlooking their shorter term incarceration in county and city jails. As a law student (University of Washington, 2005-2008, J.D.), my 2L crim law class visited the neigboring county jail in a nearby smaller city; a new, clean, obviously costly yet oppressive facility. I noticed the presence of visibly dissociated, disoriented, and nearly-comatose inmates. When I asked our guide how many of the incarcerated suffered with diagnosable disorders (I am married to a PhD psychologist), he testily replied, “Never less than 40 percent!” He went on to complain to our group that the jail had become a “dumping ground” for the mentally ill, that they had little ability to care for them, that on-call psychiatrists could rarely spend more than 5 minutes diagnosing them, that getting them medicated was difficult, etc., etc. Later in the day he pointed out that many, without bail funds and after waiving speedy trial rights, could stay much of the the year allowed under Washington State law without going to trial, and surmised it preferable to them than sleeping under bridges in the rain. Was everything he said 100 percent accurate? I can only say that what I saw and heard during that half-day visit, in a modern jail, for the mentally ill, was grim.
Yup. We have returned to the barbarous state of 1800, when the “furiously mad” were often locked up in the same jails as common criminals, and in some states, in the county poorhouse.
We can do better. The mistakes we made in the 1960s and 1970s on this need fixing. But no one wants to face what a mistake deinstitutionalization was.
Update.
We are in the county jails ALL THE TIME. I would think that 40% is a bit high from my perspective of mentally impaired inmates in the county. Very ill-educated high school dropouts would be at least 90%. We rarely bond a person with a high school diploma or GED, people with high school degrees simply aren’t in the jails to any meaningful degree. At least not in Michigan.
When we get calls from obviously mentally ill inmates we often hear from the families that “…frankly Bobby/Mary/Whoever is probably in the best place they can be, as we no longer know what to do with him/her/whoever. We’ve bonded them before and they always end up back in jail and there is NO PLACE ELSE to take them. We don’t know what to do”.
As a general rule it can be very hard for inmates to get the meds they need and are on when in the county jails. We see this ALL THE TIME.
Where did he get the money to buy that pistol and the ammunition ? He had no job.
From selling pot!
Well legalize it and take the criminal profits out of the equation.
I am so relieved that SOMEONE if finally addressing this very, very serious societal problem!Many years ago circumstances introduced me to the issues of mental health treatment in this country. I well remember the time when the movement to empty the mental hospitals began. Many of the homeless are mentally ill people. For years I have probably bored my family and friends with this subject and its effect both on those that are ill and in need of treatment and the community at large. My husband served as a university administrator and one of his ongoing problems was dealing with sick people who were often a danger to themselves and to others and were existing in the revolving door of the mental health system. It is NOT compassion that turns disturbed people onto the streets of this country..
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Wash. Examiner’s Owens suggests right-wing violence will be necessary, hopes we “feel threatened”
August 03, 2010 2:27 pm ET by Ben Dimiero
Earlier today, I pointed out that conservative media figures have recently been ramping up discussion of possible civil war and armed revolt. Conservative blogger Bob “Confederate Yankee” Owens, who was recently hired by the Washington Examiner, stated that nations that have supposedly collapsed as far as ours have the need to either “reform or replace their governments,” and “reform increasingly seems to be a fleeting option.” Perhaps to prove my point, Owens now says Media Matters should “feel threatened” by him, and even suggests that violence will be necessary.
In a new post titled “Closer to Midnight”, Owens responds to my earlier post by writing: “They portray it as a threat when ‘Conservative media figures openly discuss armed revolution.’ I hope they do feel threatened.” He adds that our “feigned ignorance” and “mockery” in the face of “peaceable protests” means that “perhaps it will take a serious review of our capacity for violence to get them to realize we shall not surrender our individual liberties to their lust for power.”
We have moved “closer to midnight” not because of any singular act , but because of inertia of a political class that does not respect or enforce the laws, or this nation’s sovereignty. We have diametrically opposed views of how our nation can and should be run, and it appears that there is very little room left for negotiation.
Propagandists for the elitists at Media Matters seem troubled by A Nation on the Edge of Revolt. They portray it as a threat when “Conservative media figures openly discuss armed revolution.”
I hope they do feel threatened. Attempts at peaceable protests have been met at turns by feigned ignorance, then mockery, then attacks on the character and motives of those would not sit quietly by. Perhaps it will take a serious review of our capacity for violence to get them to realize we shall not surrender our individual liberties to their lust for power.
I have not yet been swayed to the point of view that an armed conflict is inevitable, TN_NamVolunteer. But we are close enough that one would be wise to prepare for a possible conflict, just as one would prepare for any coming storm.
I wonder what the Washington Examiner’s policy is for employees who openly speculate on the need for politically motivated violence.
I wonder about the motives of somebody who posts something like this.
I hope that I don’t get in trouble for having my history students read the Declaration of Independence. That’s REALLY scary stuff!
Better not show them that third stanza of the National Anthem that nobody ever mentions, either. Nothing bloody there.
Very extreme. Remember when Alan Keyes built his campaign platform around the DoI? I was in college at the time and my leftward friends were all horrified by the thought.
I read “conservative” blogs all the time and have yet to read anything that resembles what you have quoted here. I think you are making things up or have found a liberal pretending to be a conservative. That is beyond conservative… and not at all main stream. Are you a troll?
“Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn.”
Alas, I don’t know that there is much of a solution here. Both the left and the right have their reasons to oppose mass institutionalization of the mentally ill.
Society does not want to pay for the institutionalization of hundreds of thousands of people. Others are concerned about their civil rights, liberty, or the fact that some repressive societies have used a “mentally ill” cover story to incarcerate dissidents.
As I posted on another thread, huge state mental hospitals were shuttered, then demolished or converted to something else in the last forty years. A responsible policy (if we could afford it) would be to fund new facilities, and use them for the mentally ill. Alas, you would also get thousands of false positives, people who were essentially harmless, but were in the wrong place at the wrong time and just happened to scare someone. You really would re-create another massive bureaucracy, which right now we half-assedly avoid by homeless shelters, half-way houses, food kitchens, letting people sleep on the grates in the city etc.
It is, however, to my mind a reason for more stringent background checks for gun-buyers. Admittedly, even those checks won’t be fool-proof, but the fact that this guy could just walk in and buy his Glock, as great an affirmation of our Second Amendment rights as that is, is also a red flag to a majority (I would say) of the voters to consider stronger background checks and closing loopholes.
Ah yes, yes, Dwight, I think you are on to something here, or at least up to something here. Auto deaths of very roughly 50,000 a year shout out for more background checks on drivers. And have you noticed, Dwight, that the shooter was recently a student and that quite a few of these crazed shooters
seem to be students, going all the way back to the Texas tower shooter.
Doesn’t this fact cry out for an examination, a much more careful examination of teachers, who, in your words,: “…are just characterologically impaired, like narcissists, antisocials, and extremists who just embrace limited and hostile rhetoric[in the classroom]…”?
I was a professor in a university before I retired and over the years occasionally encountered mentally-disturbed students in my classes. One of the things I discovered was that often these students were enrolled in the university because the parents had no other place to put them. These students were incapable of holding a job because of their overtly bizarre behavior or speech; they apparently refused to go to their psychiatrists or other medical professionals; they refused to stay on their medications, if they had been prescribed them. The parents did not want them wandering the streets, so they would enroll them in one university course each semester. The students would travel to campus and tend to stay on campus all day, sometimes attending a variety of classes, even though they were not enrolled formally in them. In short, the university was a safe place for them to be all day.
Fred, Drivers are tested; they have to get into a car with an instructor who can observe their behavior, as well as their skills. Drivers are monitored, regularly fined, arrested have their licenses taken away, insurance raised etc. as part of a process. Beyond that, do you have a point?
As for your second line of assertion, I know that you are trying to make another point, but you come up with some quotations that I do not recognize, attribute them to being my words. Something about teachers being responsible???
What if this nut had bought a car and ran thru the crowd instead of a gun? We would still be looking at the sad reality of dead bodies.
More regulation and laws is not the answer. How about the report that a clerk at Walmart told the guy he was out of ammo and turned him away? That at least worked to slow this nut down. Too bad this person didn’t call security right then and there and this whole thing could have been prevented.
Life is dangerous. Life is terminal. You can’t regulate or legislate against stupidity or insanity no matter how strong the power play by progressives to control our lives at every turn.
I agree that the cannot guarantee anyone’s safety, but is the default position that we do nothing?
Dwight – On the contrary! Now is the time to educate and raise awareness on the downward spiral of mental illness. Now is the time to exhort friends and family to look out for those they know and love.
Now is NOT the time to make political hay and steal the liberty and freedom of the many because of the actions of the very few.
If a paranoid psychotic can learn how to answer a shrink’s or msm’s questions at the first session and ace the test on the second, what chance does a walmart clerk have against such devious character? With rampant neurosis populating the msm and the political left you cant expect any support for increased oversight by government psychologists that are loosed with almost unlimited power to verify incarceration of anyone outside of the CIA. What you have to fear most are increasing numbers of all deviants in public office or behind a badge that will always protect their own kind while shielded by msm’s whitewash. If the prevalent pattern is followed walmart may soon stop all sales of ammo. Mission accomplished.
LocalYokel,
You have it backwards.
“If a paranoid psychotic can learn how to answer a shrink’s or msm’s questions at the first session and ace the test on the second, what chance does a walmart clerk have against such devious character? ”
And yet the Walmart clerk *did* spot Loughner. The question ought to be, “If an ordinary Walmart clerk could tell this man was off the rails, why couldn’t an expert have spotted him and put him somewhere safe?”
Numerous commentators here keep constantly making remarks about why he wasn’t stopped from buying his gun, with the implication that more gun laws are needed. Folks, the right law already existed in AZ, mentally ill people can’t buy guns. The problem in this case was he was never declared to be mentally ill. I blame the sherriff, and local mental health officials, who despite numerous threats from and reports about this whacko, seemed to be more concerned about avoiding scandal for the family, than getting this maniac off the street, or at least ensuring he was on the insta check list of people who could not buy guns.
This makes the sherrifs rediculous statements that talk radio was somehow to blame that much more contemptable, since it was the sherrif himself that negligently allowed this wacko to be on the street, and still allowed to buy guns.
Thank you Richard40 for putting us in the picture. In Arizona Mentally sick people are not allowed to buy guns. Good idea. Next step is to diagnose anyone when they apply for their first gunlicense. It would take some organising to make sure the shrinks are safe if they make a diagnosis the madman does not like but there is never a perfect time to make that diagnosis. Much better before a gun license is issued than after.
You should see what’s happening in Romania, the mentally ill people are leading the country.
Romania? No shocker there. That’s the place where they just legalized incest.
Part of the problem lies in the ‘theraputization’ of evil. Most of the readers here will be familiar with the rise of the ‘theraputic culture’ in the 1950s and 1960s. This is, and had been, part of the liberal view that good and evil were arbitrary, and thus false and fantastic constructions. All part of the move to remove individuals’ responsibility for their own actions. The notion that ‘bad behavior’ stemmed from some sort of sickness was soon morphed into the idea that society itself was sick. Thus, the state must intervene.
Yup. This was only a small part of the problem, but there were proponents of it:
Don’t look for anyone on the left to come to this sane conclusion. They are too busy working this ‘twofer’ – further suppression of the Second Amendment – and their continuing assault on the First Amendment hoping to muzzle free speech.
Well imagine that?
Someone “quite liberal” and a “political radical” trying to kill a leader in his own party.
Who would have guessed?
I think the shutting down of mental institutions, besides a “saving money” gesture, was part and parcel of the politically correct movement in this country.
We can’t, after all, point out specific individuals who, you know, are acting completely irrationally and saying really dumb, weird, threatening things. Or guys in their early 20′s (the age for it) on the verge of a Grade A psychotic break.
That would be, you know, singling them out and hurting their feelings.
And junque.
Good point. Words like Imbecile, Moron, Idiot, Retarded, and Deviant used to be legitimate descriptive terms. Now they are just insults.
It’s not PC to accurately describe anyone mentally disabled.
Paranoid schizophrenia is a qualifying prerequisite to be employed and published by the Kook U.S. main stream media.
The more displaced you are from reality, the closer you get to the front page. Or, editor in chief. We know that shame or guilt is not ever experienced by these kooks.
But, on the positive side; Who would attempt an attack a nation of whacked out nuts, unless you consider yourself more nuts than they are?
Krugman is a case on point.
Yes! And he’s institutionalized at The New York Times! Fitting, isn’t it?
I was beaten up and medically raped in a mental hospital. Today, I have no right to sue anybody, and no right to ask what was the justification. Just some arrogant, pig, pretenders at understanding the human mind decided that I needed it, even though I, completely passively, refused to cooperate with their “examination”.
Nobody on this board begging for increased lockups gives a damn about human rights, and your compassion is fraudulent. Just because a tiny fraction of the people whom you would deem “mentally ill” for the simple reason that you do not understand them commit violent crimes, you do not have a justification for locking up the group.
Guess what? Every group has violent people.
There is nothing whatsoever compassionate about putting people into what is, for all practical purposes, a prison, subject to arbitrary authority of an arrogant “God person” and abuse by their thugs. Read the famous marine study about guards and prisoners (anyone with an IQ over 80 can find it using Google).
Being forced to take medication against your will is like being raped.
I would choose to put every single person who urges locking up people because they can find quacks who will say they are mentally ill into a lockup before I would let the quacks victimize anyone. You are extremely passively aggressive in urging violence upon innocent people.
I have informed my government that I will no longer pay taxes any more, because it is written into the law that I cannot sue the quacks who raped me (why is that, you frauds of compassion?). I have also claimed $10,000,000.00 in compensation. The tax people, who would calculate that I owe over $16,000.00 in taxes, haven’t got the guts to take me to court. Can’t let a victim of your “compassion”, who calls it rape, get inside a courtroom.
Ever wonder why Andrei Sakharov was locked up? Why not find a “doctor” to break his bones and claim he needed to have them reset, or injecxt him with poison and claim he needed it for treatment for a bacterial infection? It’s because psychiatry is as phony as the day is long. Only psychiatry could find people like Sakharov needed treatment. His “need” for treatment was not dependant upon Sakharov’s state at all. It was dependant upon the external factors in his society that decided it didn’t want to tolerate people like him.
There certainly needs to be legal safeguards to prevent someone from being hospitalized without a pretty good reason. It seems to be an article of faith that people were being regularly hospitalized who were merely eccentric or a bit different. But while researching this issue, I was astonished at how few examples I could find of this. They have to have happened, of course. People make mistakes. But even ACLU’s representative at Congressional hearings in 1963 admitted that she could not give any examples of such. I talked to psychiatric nurses who worked in mental hospitals in the old days–and they knew of no one who was not obviously mentally ill who was committed. I did find one case where a 16 year old was hospitalized overnight without being mentally ill–but she was out in the morning.
Mental hospitals have always been underfunded in the U.S. At least in public institutions, doctors had strong reasons to discharge patients who were not seriously ill, because they were taking up beds that could be used for those who were seriously ill. (Private mental hospitals might be a different matter, although these were not common until the 1970s.)
Sorry Cramer. If someone wanting to justify slavery (you) did research by talking amongst slave holders and foremen on slave based agricultural operations, they would be able to report that the slaves were inferior people full os superstitions and fear, and that there was no known example of someone having being enslaved who should not have.
What you fight for is not just wrong, it is evil.
It happens. I spent 39 hours and 20+ minutes in an institution, even though all the staff members were asking why I was there. I did not, nor have I ever, had any mental illness. I was not under the influence of any drugs or alcohol. I was taken away from my home in my PJ’s, in handcuffs, by the police, on nothing more than the word of someone who was mad at me and wanted to punish me for something I said. I was interviewed by two doctors while I was there, and both said I was not mentally ill. However, I was not allowed to leave until the person who called 911 recanted his story.
You were held for a bit under two days for observation. The doctors came to the correct conclusion that you were not mentally ill. It sounds like the person who called 911 had made a serious charge that needed to be resolved. Observational holds are limited in time. In California, for example, beyond 17 days requires a court hearing.
This does not mean that the system works perfectly. But the idea that lots of people were locked up for extended stays without reason seems to be without foundation.
It happens. I was institutionalized for 39 hours and 20+ minutes. I was not, am not, and never have been mentally ill. I was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol. I was taken away in handcuffs in my pj’s on nothing more than the word of someone who was mad at me and wanted to punish me for something I said. The staff at the mental hospital had no idea why I was there. I was interviewed by two doctors, and both said I was not mentally ill. However, I was not permitted to leave the institution until the person who made the call initially recanted his story against me.
@Storm
In your case, the system worked.
You were a case flagged, then the police taken you and asked for an evaluation. The evaluation confirmed that you was not nut.
What matter is “what happened to the man denouncing you?”
Was he evaluated by psychiatrists? Was he tried for his false accuse?
A good system have feedbacks.
There is not a system working perfectly. But a good system detect problem and move to correct them. Checks and balances.
Limited experience, but I’ve seen abuses in psych wards/lockups, such as a guy I was tutoring in reading being forced to take a medication that made him sick everytime he took it. As far as I knew (and I didn’t know everything) he had never been violent towards another person.
Interesting you should mention Sakharov, one of my heroes who said, following his illegal and inhumane incarceration, that as long as he maintained his own mental integrity and couldn’t be broken, he’d be good. Such an attitude PO’ed his would be crushers/handlers, to be sure.
Imprisoning (perceived) political enemies is a Russian speciality, of course. A popular alternative, assassinating them.
Currently there is the sad case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose prison term was just re-upped by 6 years, to keep him out of Putin’s hair.
Tragic.
“Limited experience, but I’ve seen abuses in psych wards/lockups, such as a guy I was tutoring in reading being forced to take a medication that made him sick everytime he took it.”
I do not dispute that there is abuse in psychiatric hospitals. My argument is that the claim that sane people were frequently locked up without reason seems unsupported.
Side effects are a real, and occasionally lethal problem. At one time, the courts held that refusing to treat someone in a mental hospital was a violation of their rights. Yet within ten years, this had reversed, and someone who refused treatment had to be released.
My job, as a nurse, is to give drugs to my patients. Given I work in a psychiatric ward, sometimes this is not easy.
I know perfectly that some of these drugs have collateral effects, but usually the psychiatrists try to calibrate the medications to the need of the patients. Enough to do their job, not enough to cause major problems.
This not always is possible, but better to have nausea or running around babbling, half or full naked, with the risk to damage someone or himself, unable to eat or wash or simply defecate?
I can cite a contrary example that had tragic results for my family where someone who should have been confined was not. You can find one example for nearly everything, and any mistake here is huge.
We can certainly do better.
You’ve got an anecdote do you?
Your comment is also an anecdote.
In virtually all of the cases where a mentally ill person escalates to extreme violence against others, there are multiple warning signs and missed chances — threats, behavior patterns, buck-passing. And very frequently there are prior records of crimes that ended up being excused either because the person was mentally ill or despite it, quite frankly because most crimes that do not rise to literally shooting or raping someone get pled down, dismissed, or otherwise excused these days — particularly in large jurisdictions and juvenile systems.
Maybe this is the case here. Maybe not. But the Cuckoo’s Nest mantra that any intervention equals oppression is a pretty bloody mess and has been for forty+ years now. And systematic, routine failures to count violent assaults on people in the helping professions as legal assaults have so skewed the statistics that activists get away with a lot of nonsense.
Some predators are mentally ill and some mentally ill people are predators, and they belong in prison despite their illnesses, because that is where they can do the least harm — including harm to other people with mental illness.
I think a lot of people across the political spectrum would be grateful for a little myth-clearing. Nobody is proposing a witch hunt. Nobody “thinks all mentally ill people are violent.” Nobody is being thrown in jail “because they’re a little eccentric.” Even many staunch ACLUers admit that we have set the bar too high in forcing seriously ill people to receive treatment. Look at Pete Earley’s book on the subject. It an interesting, if frustrating read.
No, my comment is not an anecdote. It is personal testimony of an experience which demands justice. All the rest are second hand descriptions which apply labels to people who are inconvenient to the people applying the labels. I would sympathize with their burdens, except that it pales to the burden I have carried for 30 years, living in an unjust society which has insufficient understanding of right and wrong to grasp that it can never force a person to undergo psychiatric treatment, no matter how damned inconvenient that person is. The humiliation is so great, that only the ability to post this anonymously allows me to post it. Of course I do not want to have anything to do with people who think this is OK.
I’m just going to put down here once more, to all those who think they are authorities on this, that in a large medical faculty, I scored, in what can only be explained by superior intelligence, in a surprise test on general knowledge of biology given to all new students in that faculty, the second highest mark by one percentage point, that the faculty had ever awarded any student. It can only be explained by superior intelligence because I had taken the absolute minimum number of biology related courses allowed to get into the faculty. Most of the other students had taken biology relate majors, honours degrees, and even biology related masters degrees. I beat every single person but one who had taken that test, not because I knew more biology, but because a multiple choice test that is not full of internal clues to the right answer is almost impossible to write. You can’t use them, of course, unless you have sufficient intelligence. The same clues were there for all the rest of the students, most of whom had greater knowledge of the subject than I, but, hmmm, for some funny reason, I beat every single one of them but one.
I did the same thing with my wife, a dentist, who was studying old American Dental Board exams in order to get a license to practise in the US. On a long car journey, she started reading out the questions and the list of answers. I got more right than she did. She was so disconcerted by this that for the next few days she talked to me as if I was one of her colleagues.
Sorry, but I am completely unimpressed by the brains in the medical fields. It is the people in the mathematical sciences whose brains scare me, and I can tell you that if I go onto a board where that kind of person hangs, the skepticism, and even derisive skepticism about the “psyences” (sorry Old Soldier, I made up another word, must be evidence of my insanity, eh), is widespread.
Clayton Cramer spouts out statistics, but he has already demonstrated that he has no real understanding of statistics at all. He doesn’t know what he is talking about. He has learned the whole load of mumbo jumbo, but has he had an original thought in his life?
When the thug in the “caring” medical institution smashed me to the ground, I learned from that instant (it took me a while to understand it) that it was not me who was not fit for your society, it is you who are not fit for mine. I have a far, far better understanding of right and wrong than you do. I don’t rape people. I don’t go to hockey matches in the hope of seeing to babyish players smash at each other in fits of temper while nursing the belief that it is very manly to engage in this utterly safe activity. I would never watch two men smash at each other until one is unconscious, which is pretty close to watching gladiators kill each other in a Roman arena. I despise the immoral cowards who sit on their fat butts watching boxing matches. I also despise the babyish fighting hockey players, but I do not despise the boxers, who really are doing something dangerous, and probably have few other ways to get out of their various ghettos. When I go to the supermarket, I try to put my shopping cart in a way that minimally interferes with others. About one in three of you “normals” are such pigs that you haven’t even managed to figure out that if you leave your cart in the middle of the aisle and stand beside it while you search a shelf, you are blocking the aisle. I don’t drive around on a perfectly clear night with my fog lights on, which is becoming a widespread habit, because I am sufficiently aware to realize that while the lights do nothing to improve illumination where I actually need it, they increase the light in the face of other drivers. I call these lights “moron lights” because anyone following the moron trend to use them when they are not needed. I’d be willing to bet there’s a correlation between using these lights and low IQ, just as there is with criminal behaviour and low IQ.
I guess you can dismiss all this as “raving”.
Yeah, I like to keep the hell away from people like you. I guess that’s what you’d call becoming a loner. But I understand that isolation actually is harmful (the only reason that shoving us away from you and into institutions doesn’t harm you is that you are so common that getting away from us doesn’t isolate you. You get to keep all your stupid superstitions as you exclude us and reassure yourselves that your rapings and beatings are caring activity). So I have a family, and I keep a few more moral people around. I have three sons. One is a second year cadet in a military institution who has already been selected to be a pilot. One is a high school junior who, on the basis of music compositions he submitted to the band leader, was asked to write a march that the band could perform on parade day. The youngest is still developing and has not yet chosen a particular direction.
I realize that some of the expression in what I have written is somewhat disconnected. This is because my emotions weigh heavily on my expression of this topic and make me gush somewhat as I think of things to say faster than I can write them down. I normally am quite careful with my writing. I say this because I have no doubt at all that many would use the gushing nature of this expression to reassure themselves that I am a bit loony.
Listen to anyone describing something which highly impacts their emotions.
Sara Palin is not responsible for these deaths but I think you can make a pretty good case that Thomas Szasz is.
Sara Palin is not responsible for these deaths but I think you can make a pretty good case that Thomas Szasz is.
Bingo! Someone has a sense of history and understands. Who remembers Theodore Frankl?
My bad. I meant to say Viktor Frankl. I also argue that even Freud and B.F. Skinner, as opposite as they may seem, also contributed to the rise of the ‘theraputic culture’ of non-responsibility. But more importantly, their ideas went a long way towards de-humanizing humanity.
And then, there was the Scottish psychiatrist, RD Laing, who wrote in his book, “Knots” (pub 1970):
“Jack tries to get Jill to see
that Jack can see
what Jill can’t see
but Jack can’t see
that Jill can’t see that Jill can’t see it”
The meme of innocents thrown into hideous insane asylums is a popular one. The movie “Snake Pit” preceded “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by a few decades, but they all resulted in a rush to shut down the asylums. Conservatives loved it because it saved money. Liberals loved it because they bought the idea that there are no really insane people, that indeed, the insane are the actual SANE people, who really SEE the world as it is.
Of course, in the process of shutting down the huge asylums, the Liberals, the Good, the Politicians, promised, wanted to replace them with a lovely series of small caring facilities, from which the Insane could assume their rightful place in society. Of course, very little of this came to fruition.
The reality is, we know very little about mental disease. I think that is why there is little or no effort to actually engage with the problem.
Over the last three years I’ve learned just how right you are about how little is known about mental illness. I have family members who have gone through several nifty new diagnoses, and in some of the group discussions I attended many of the people there had been ‘diagnosed’ a dozen times with different disorders. The other problem is the medicines–there are really only two, despite all the different names and concentrations. I think the psychiatric system needs a complete overhaul. They need to try a Descartes approach because there are too many assumptions going in for them to ever make it work. I keep hoping that neurology will finally reach the point of making psychiatry obsolete, but we’re still a long way off.
The most frightening thing (to me) about the way this profession works is that it’s just like what I used to do fixing computers and printers. Trial and error. “This problem usually means this part is bad, replace it, turn it back on, see if it works. If it works, that was the problem.”
That’s just what these (State-paid) ‘doctors’ do–try a med, if it works, problem solved, if not, try another and another and different dosages. There’s almost no attempt to find the actual problem, just to find a med that makes the patient reasonably tractable. Those who don’t have family to take care of them have almost no recourse, no help, and nowhere to go to find out what can be done. This goes for drug addicts as well as the mentally ill, and it’s no surprise to me that the two cross over so extensively.
I don’t have a solution, and I wish somebody did, or at least that anybody actually cared about it. Just because there were abuses in the past doesn’t mean they’re universally inevitable. But then a profession that doesn’t believe in evil can hardly do very well at preventing it from happening.
I had a discussion with a local fellow, once, a person who had spent his life helpless because of a mental illness. In the process, I came to see things from his point of view: when you are powerless, things happen. Like the “Victim” on this thread, speaking about ‘chemical rape.’ Well, she may have a very good point there: the fellow told me that the drugs on offer today have many terrible physical side effects. But the doctors, etc., have all the power in these situations. I am not saying that doctors are ‘evil.’ However, we just don’t know enough. And in that circumstance, it is easiest for society to ignore the problem, and the mental health establishment to try to shuffle the problem person away from sight.
It seems that the shooter had made many threatening phone calls to the Sheriff’s office, phone calls that were ignored. But. What can legally be done in these cases? Nothing. Not until a murder or assault or suicide occurs.
Ah, those heady days of The Divided Self and The Politics of Experience, eh? Our analysis is apparently similar; a boomer generation was smoking dope for the first time, and anything seemed possible. Since the establishment got us into the war and the war was wrong, maybe they were wrong about everything.
Now the Tea Party & c has decided that the elitist establishment is wrong about everything. O brave new world that hath such creatures in it; no shortage of Trinculos there.
This topic is right on target;there is no rhyme or reason in the mind of someone severely mentally ill. That is something few people in our world are able to recognize. They feel it is cruel to institutionalize anyone, that community based care will work. Unfortunately the nature of this illness makes the patient refuse to take any medications, not show up for outpatient appointments, take to the street to live in a delusional world.
They do not need any “rhetoric” to put ideas into their heads, the ideas are already there and make perfect sense to them.
I wish everyone would be more open to the facts than so quick to try to make sense of something when there is no sense to it.
Also would very much like to read your book.
If there were a JournoList where those of us in the middle got our daily talking points, point number one would the following. The ultra-left wing media’s rush to try to pin the Tucson murders on good guys will have a very deadly consequence: every other nut in the country sees an hour of fame when they murder several people.
When other mass murders happen, it won’t be because of weapons access, it will be because the left-wing media will reward the murderers with what they crave, fame, recognition and attention.
This point should be repeated again and again. It isn’t the rhetoric of non-left wingers that does damage, it is giving the crazies what they want.
All it took was a 9mm. GLOCK to cause this havock
I see. So this Glcok pistol somehow acquired a mind of its own and perpetrated this tragedy? Please explain.
Yes Anon and a fast moving Buick Park Avenue, as noted earlier, could have done even more damage. Better yet try a Mack, they work great.
Mayhem in Tucson: When Libs Trip Out
. . . It’s not a pretty picture, especially for anyone who still naively believes the mainstream media and public officials are in any way objective, and do keep in mind that what follows is merely a smattering of distorted leftist propaganda.
Former sportscaster and current MSNBC political commentator Keith Olbermann, who was caught and very temporarily suspended, for all of two days in November for violating MSNBC’s minimal standards of professional conduct, weighed in with his usual feigned profundity on the daytime nightmare in Tucson.
Being the professional that he still thinks he is, Olbermann pleaded with his paltry audience of ”Countdown” viewers not to seek “payback or revenge” against conservatives ”who have so irresponsibly brought us to this time of domestic terrorism” and “put the guns down.” He also called for the banishment of Sarah Palin from the Republican Party, banishment being the more PC sunbstitute for execution.
See Olbermann’s dripping-with-sincerity, moronically presumptuous and fatuous commentary, here: http://tiny.cc/c7kg1
Drippy Olbermann makes reference in that commentary to a supporter of his point of view, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, the unofficial anti-Sheriff Joe Arpaio Arizona official.
Unlike Sheriff Joe, the self-proclaimed and duly worthy “toughest sheriff in America,” which rep has earned Arpaio the enmity of the Obama administration and illegal aliens everywhere, Sheriff Dupnik may be said to have earned the title of the “wimpiest sheriff in America.” . . .
(Read more at . . . http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=3366)
Be careful about institionalizing anyone for any reason.
Who watches the watchment?
Many professionals in the fields related to mental illness are more than a bit left of center, politically and socially. As with all human beings, they bring inbuilt biases to the table, no matter the topic…or the individual under assesment.
When both the left and right have already presented ‘studies’ proving that their ideological opponents are a bit insane? Well…I hesitate to threaten to institutionalize anyone, short of them being an immediate physical threat to themselves or to others.
Which is why Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), trained in psychiatry, and certifiably insane himself, decided to jump into this fray. Just watch him lead the charge to “prove” this guy sane.
In fact, the trial is also going to be a spectacle. He really only has one defense, and that’s insanity. I’m afraid that his public defender is going to deliberately take a dive, because it’s better for the left if he’s found competent. At this point, the determination of his mental state is a political matter, and politics will attempt to influence the outcome.
You’re right. Boths sides have already used this tragedy to promote their political agendas – or defend them. Sadly, our political class aren’t going to stand above the fray and act like statesmen, let alone as if they were men and women who possessed some form of honor and maturity. (We keep electing such people as those who now rule us… and we wonder why things never change.)
When looking for a solution, I would suggest taking a look at Kansas, especially Johnson County on the eastern side of the state near Kansas City. They have community-based supports for the mentally ill, and have done a commendable job in caring for those that I know of. My brother-in-law had suffered for years, often being homeless or hospitalized, until he moved across the state line and was able to access the care he needed. They helped him apply for disability benefits, get a subsidized apartment, provided transportation to a part-time job, had a case manager checking in on him weekly to make sure he was taking his meds and stepping in to take him to the hospital at one time. The police officers here are well-trained in mental illness crisis intervention and can and do help in these situations.
For children with mental illness and their families, they have a separate program of community-based services. The program’s stated goal is to provide the supports necessary to keep kids out of the hospital. They are a life-saver, and a money-saver for the state as well I presume.
Yeah, Mark in Texas. It’s not Jared Loughner who’s responsible for the Arizona shooting, it’s People who think that everybody you can’t understand should be locked up, just as the people who don’t think every biker should be locked up are responsible for biker crime.
This is a matter of political cost/benefit analysis,
which includes the effect on voter choices as part of
the benefit.
1) Deinstitutionalization is a net positive; The money
saved by closing the institutions and turning the inmates
out on the street earns a higher return elsewhere.
2) Disability payments are a net positive; It is cheaper
to subsidize in-home care by family than to pay for the
medical and police bills generated by street people.
During the unparalleled increase in US prosperity of the last century,
the funding allocated to care of the mentally ill reached its maximum.
During the coming Hard Times, the politicians will have all they can do
to provide for the taxpaying citizens; Everybody else will be neglected,
and those who react to the increasing stress of living by doing violence
will be eliminated.
The key question is: “Who defines who’s ‘mentally ill’ and how?”
Many (on the right) hold the view that being a ‘leftist’ is mental illness – and to a large extent there’s some evidence to support this claim.
Anarchists, from those of the 19th century to the present, are more or less ‘mentally ill’ beyond reasonable doubt. Murder has always been an instrument of political action for these individuals, and indeed one of them (anarchist and murderer) caused World War I. Further, is there any doubt that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the rest of them, wasn’t a mental case?
And another related question: when a leader of a country, through reckless economic policies, pushes a country to the brink of economic ruin (which contains many social costs/illnesses as one of its major social externalities) for purely political purposes, is he a mental case or not?
Poli Sci
You asked “Who defines who’s ‘mentally ill’ and how?”
Psychiatrists do. And they follow this book:
http://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/sec15/ch202/ch202e.html
(although to my knowledge, the definition and diagnosis of schizophrenia encompasses more symptoms in the US than in Europe).
Actually, the diagnosis is completely impressionistic, with “the book” used to justify a diagnosis that has been made. It cannot be used to pick out a “crazy” person in an objective way. It’s utter bullshit to anyone used to actual critical reasoning.
Victim, what you wrote simply show up that you can be very intelligent, for sure. But you have your mental problems.
Mathematicians and logicians have an high rate of mental disease (Goede for example) because their brain need to function of a level very abstract. But more they are able to be abstract, more they are able to distance themselves from the reality, more they risk to lose contact with the reality.
Like violinists, the betters have joins of the finger very flexible. Some are so flexible they are pathologically flexible.
You show to be very intelligent but very emotive. In fact, it is not abnormal very intelligent people is unable to control their emotions and are controlled by them. They are simply unable to control them.
I would be careful to say that there is an absolute right to not be medicated against your will. First because a psychiatric patient when ill is unable to have a will. But suppose he has a will. Well, now he is responsible for any thing and every thing he do.
If you become a nuisance for the others, they have the right to prevent you from accosting them, to talk to them, to deny you a job and to haul you in jail for every and any law you break.
If a medication can not be imposed, the same can be said about food and water or washing people. Then why not simply leave people like you in the street, in their shit and piss, babbling around alone? They have the right to die, in they don’t want live or are unable to. Don’t they?
Maybe we have forgotten already that the Soviet Union used “mental illness” as an instrument to commit political opponents to psychiatric wards and the Gulag.
Moreover, maybe we have forgotten already that Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and all that scum of the earth were “mental cases” themselves.
Mr. Cramer, trying to compare America to GB, Germany and Finland fails again.
Finland, for example, has one of the highest gun-ownership rates in the world. Basically you have to be a member of a shooting club (for a year?) before the authorities issue you a permit to purchase a gun. You need a permit for each gun, as well permit to purchase powder, etc.
Carry permits are being issued rarely.
Every Finn is “in the books” from conception to their death: health history, etc. It is practically impossible for a mentally ill Finn to get a permit to purchase a legal firearm.
As to the “numerous” mass-murders in Finland, the first school shooting of the two occurred in 2007, and was an obvious attempt to go “Columbine.” Then there was the illegal Muslim criminal invader who went … Muslim and massacred ex-girl friend and a couple Finns with an illegal gun.
In 2009 there were 114 murders in Finland, which translates into 2.07 / 100,000 people.
Now, you could compare the United States to Norway or Switzerland …
So….force people against their own will to go in a hospital. I can imagine about a million things wrong with this.
We have a problem in our correctional system(s) as it is with people being imprisoned unjustly, what makes any of you believe that this wont happen with the author’s wants? All it takes is one person’s views to be determined odd, to be taken away…placed in front of a review board…then his/her life is set to be behind a padded cell or free simply for their views?
All it takes today is someone to call the police and make a statement about person X , and their own fears of X…and police come to Mr.X’s house guns drawn.
If the case was based on someone behaving “oddly”, who is to determine what is odd? I am 20something living in the NW and libertarian, I am considered odd up here, would I be imprisoned ?
The author wants to impose this again, simply based off of rare occurrences of violence and mental issues being linked. That will do nothing to stop it. The author is letting fear grip them, and wants to take away the potential of other people’s rights simply so he can feel safer.
“All it takes is one person’s views to be determined odd,”
Uh, no. Holding odd views has not been a committable offense in recent decades. Even 18th century English law recognized the difference between opinions and behavior when it came to the definition of mental illness.
“All it takes is one person’s views to be determined odd,”
Uh, no. Holding odd views has not been a committable offense in recent decades. Even 18th century English law recognized the difference between opinions and behavior when it came to the definition of mental illness.
I dont think you understood what I am trying to say here. All it takes is to have X views, and then do Y actions and bam…you are in a padded room. I will give you an example of this happening here in Oregon.
A guy is placed on admin leave from post office, at the same time he received his tax return. He purchased some guns, some one from work called in about him and his views and how he was placed on leave, next thing swat is at his door, they take his guns and force him into a mental hospital for 48 hours. He had no intentions of harming anyone, he just had extra money and enjoyed guns.
Now, do you honestly think that because your view is different, or ” doesnt make sense” to someone else that you wont have the potential to be picked up? I think you are giving people to much of the benefit of the doubt, as i stated about my views and where I live…having a different non commie/socialist view …people treat me like i have something seriously wrong with my mental capabilities. Maybe i am not giving people enough of the benefit of the doubt, but i am only going off my experiences, not hope.
Being brought in a ward to be examined for a couple of days is not a real problem. It can be disconforting, but not a big problem.
The real problem is the police and how the policemen managed the information they got.
But it appear to be a problem of the US, UK and likes. Neighbours and co-workers reactying calling the cops for anythings out of order. And the cops militarized and acting like stormtroopers (thanks to the War on Drugs).
Deinsititutionalization was a travesty to both patients and the communities these patients were literally dumped in as solely a cost savings means. But, to use what is truly an isolated example of mental health as a POSSIBLE cause to this tragedy last Saturday to call for anyone seemed as an alleged danger, but moreso to be used as a “detriment” or “disruption” be indefinitely psychiatrically hospitalized will return mental health to the equally inappropriate role of punitive measures as used decades ago.
I have worked in inpatient settings of late, and firsthand seen patients who were prematurely released back into communities, but also now seeing “patients” be sent to psychiatric facilities to avoid incarceration who have no place to be in psychiatric facilities. Treatment is individual specific, and as long as states do not see mental health care as an important service to be budgeted to minimize abandonment or neglect, or worse, minimal management of ongoing care needs that needs strong supervision, people with mental health disorders will suffer. And as long as such individuals impact on others in the community, such others will suffer too.
The answer is not just “get people off the streets”. The answer is encourage the acceptance of mental health care by ending discrimination and ignorance. And a start might be reexamining the alleged political leadership that controls state and federal budgets that do not prioritize services like what I advocate for here. And I am talking about Republican and Democrat representatives.
Statistics still show psychotic individuals are less a danger to society versus those who are just characterologically impaired, like narcissists, antisocials, and extremists who just embrace limited and hostile rhetoric from those around them. And I do not want the latter group in inpatient settings. That is why we have jails, and graveyards.
“Statistics still show psychotic individuals are less a danger to society versus those who are just characterologically impaired, like narcissists, antisocials, and extremists ”
I’ve read papers arguing that psychotics are no more dangerous than the non-psychotic population; other papers demonstrate pretty persuasively that this is not the case–although it is difficult to control for the fact that psychotics are disproportionately using intoxicants, which tends to increase violence rates in all populations.
This was not an isolated incident. There are dozens of these psychotic mass murders over the last three decades. Relative to the overall murder rate, not all that dramatic–but the random, unpredictable nature of these crimes makes them especially fearsome.
When you select “psychotic” as a descriptor after a mass murder, then by definition, people who commit mass murders are psychotic. However, unless you restrict “psychotic” to those who have committed mass murder, you have no argument for institutionalizing “psychotic” people. It does not follow from “mass murders are usually committed by psychotics” that “psychotics are likely to commit mass murders”. That is a common statistical error. Hundreds of thousands of people were more or less permanently institutionalized before society came to realize that this was wrong. Hundreds of thousands of mass murders have not occurred. You cannot lock up hundreds of thousands of people because you can post facto diagnose mass murderers as psychotic (quite convenient, that).
“When you select “psychotic” as a descriptor after a mass murder, then by definition, people who commit mass murders are psychotic.”
Nope. Sometimes mass murders are committed for perfectly sensible, rational reasons. Two of the largest mass murders in U.S. history were not done for anything recognizable crazy. One was a guy angry at his girlfriend, so he poured $1 worth of gasoline in the front door of the club that she worked at–and 87 people died. Another was some union thugs who set a fire in a casino in Puerto Rico as part of their union organizing efforts; 96 people died.
If it is an even smaller population than the population of mass murderers who are actually psychotic, your argument is even weaker.
From “some mass murderers are psychotic” it does not follow that “psychotics are likely to be mass murderers”, unless, again, you restrict “psychotic” to exclude people who do not commit mass murder. An additional restriction that would exclude some mass murderers from being called psychotic because some mass murders are committed by apparently “mentally healthy” people (according to you) weakens your “statistical” case rather than strengthens it.
With your restriction, it would be even less likely that a “psychotic”, if we assume more conventionally that their numbers are commensurate with the numbers who were “inhumanely” given their freedom when the big hospitals were closed, is likely to be a mass murderer.
There is a formal name for the statistical error you are making which indicates pretty clearly that you do not know much about statistics. I cannot recall it off the top of my head, but if you continue to try to make the case from the existence of tiny numbers of mass murderers to a need to lock up masses of people, I will probably be sufficiently motivated to find out what it is.
“In spite of much more restrictive gun control laws in Europe, they have a lot of these mass murders over there also. In Finland. In Germany. In Britain.”
Finland does NOT have restrictive gun laws. They famously have the most liberal gun laws in Europe. It is common knowledge. They have as many firearms as they have citizens. Just flat out lying about the facts does not help your case.
Just like there are two sides to a coin, there are both good and bad in the fifth amendment. Accept it.
The fifth amendment was created to help citizens protect themselves against an oppressive federal government in case it turned into a dictatorship. This is a good thing. And the downside to this arrangement is obviously that there are more firearms available in society overall. And it is therefore easier for criminals and insane people to acquire guns from the black market than it would be with a more restricted market. There is no way of denying that, regardless of what your opinion on guns is. It is simple math.
There is nothing inherently good or morally superior to owning a firearm or not owning one. It’s a practical measure to prevent the country from turning into a dictatorship and it’s a practical measure for law abiding citizens to protect themselves and others against harm.
The problem with the anti gun lobbyists in my opinion is not so much that they want restrictive gun laws. They are entitled to that opinion. The problem is that they are going about it the wrong way. Instead of advocating a change or an adjustment to the constitution, they wanna circumvent the constitution and unlawfully create gun control laws not backed by the constitution. And that is a VERY bad thing.
Ah, the ignorance.
Yes, Finland has one of the highest gun-ownership rates in the world, but getting a permit it to purchase a gun is extremely difficult. One has to demonstrate the need for a gun, for example being a long-time member of a gun club. Last time I heard a year. In addition, there is no way you can get a carry permit. The same applies to Germany and Sweden. Denmark has even more strict laws regarding guns. You want to talk about “lax gun laws,’ you need to talk about Norway.
The high number of guns in the hands of Finns is due to several reasons, of which one is the rifles ‘disappeared’ after the WWII – about 300,000. Another reason is the government’s support of reservists purchasing “assault weapons’ and other firearms. Then there is the hunters. The whole handgun business started with the introduction of practical shouting sports in Finland. Prior to that, ~1980, there were hardly any handguns in the hands of civilians.
You’re correct in that Mr. Cramer is comparing apples to bananas when trying to get support for whatever he is get us convinced of here. The fact remains that in Finland it’s not 0.3% of the population who commit 80% of the crimes and most murders.
One perfect example of silly murder rate comparisons is japan. The murder rate is minuscule, but if you divide the number of murders by the few legal guns they posses (and keep locked in the gun clubs) the rate is extremely high.
Given Finland’s history with Russia, they are probably better off with an armed and dangerous population. It’s a trade off. They get better security against a dangerous neighbor. And the downside is easier access to firearms for loons and criminals. And a higher risk for the occasional crazy rampage.
No, the Finns do not have an easy access to firearms. The crime rate was rather minuscule prior to the Soviet Union falling and the Russian mafia and Somali Muslims invading Finland.
Their murder rate is still about 2 / 100,000, and it includes all kinds of incidents where someone gets killed. In Sweden, for example, they include automobile accident deaths to murder statistics.
Again, comparing America to any other country is silly.
All it took was a GLOCK to cause this meyhem
OK, you posted that above as “Anonymous.” So get to it: explain how a mechanical device caused mayhem. We’re waiting.
A friend of mine was killed by a drunk driver. In all the years that have passed I have NEVER said, “He was killed by a car,” or “He was killed by a bottle of whiskey.”
He was killed by a drunk driver.
The victims in AZ were killed by a lunatic.
Really? The Glock jumped off a table and started shooting people?
I have guns. I’ve spent years of my life carrying a loaded rifle – never shot anyone.
It took hate, actions, and intent. And it took a complete disregard for human life (not just his target’s life).
And your spoon makes you fat pedrolee!
If it were true that “all it took was a GLOCK to cause this mayhem”, then why are there not thousands of such massacres, since there are thousands of these GLOCKS in private hands?
No it took a Glock and whatever ammunition and a loaded magazine the slide to be pulled back and load a round and someone to hold the gun properly and then to pull the trigger.
Even if I one of my guns and loaded a magazine with the proper ammunition to that weapon and then slid the magazine into the weapon and then placed it in either a holster or stuck it on the nightstand next to me and never touched it again. That gun will never go off unless I or someone else picks it up and grips it and puts a round in the chamber and then pulls the trigger.
It is kind of like a car full of gasoline and in good mechanical shape as long as no one takes the keys (a safety for a car) and inserts them then starts the engine then places the vehicle into gear it can harm absolutely no one!
This is really rich coming from a Muslim.
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“I think we have to recognize that we’re all fellow human beings, one, and that we have philosophical differences, but those differences have to be met with some kind of civility,” said Carson. [Andre Carson is a Muslim Rep from Indiana.]
“Finland does NOT have restrictive gun laws. They famously have the most liberal gun laws in Europe.”
See comment 29 above, who says that they have gun laws more restrictive than any American states. They aren’t very restrictive compared to some other European countries, but that’s saying much.
Liberals are showing us again, (remember November 2009 after Ft. Hood?) that they’re willing to consider acts of terror committed by terrorists as “mental illness” and give them a pass.
The events in Arizona last Saturday demonstrated the existence of even more disturbing gambits in the “mental illness” game of the left. Responding to the fact that now even conservatives are willing to consider the murderous acts of a lefty anarchist also as acts of a “mentally sick” person, the left is on the offense. Leftists have turned the tables with impunity on the right and in turn accuse them for inciting their thugs to violence, cornering the right into playing defense. If the left gets away with this double murder (the six in Arizona, and many of the Conservatives’ political futures – like that of Sarah Palin’s now, and Mike Huckabee’s following the Seattle massacre) this game won’t end up well for them and for America.
Just a reminder: JFK’s November 1963 event brought about Johnson’s welfare state in the US, and half a century of unadulterated liberalism and loss of individual rights to the citizens of this country. That’s what you get when you play the liberals’ game in their own turf.
I do not believe that acts of evil are done because a person is mentally ill. Evil is not mentally ill. It is just evil, because that is what it is. Unfortunately some people prefer evil over better choices.
When people start harming themselves, instead of others, that could be termed mentally ill.
The vast majority of homeless people are not mentally ill. However, a good portion of the people who are homeless, choose to be so. You could not keep a roof over their head unless it was 100% free. For those folks, life is an ongoing party of booze or drugs and the bills of life will just interfer with their preferred choices. But that is not mentally ill, it is just a case of ‘not responsible behaviour’.
Psych MD, I was chemically raped over thirty years ago by your pretentious colleagues. I am still so angry about it that I am shaking as I write this, and my expression is impacted by the anger.
One year after being raped by your colleagues, I was a student in a faculty of medicine. All new students were given a surprise test on our knowledge of biology. My background was a double major in math and physics ten years earlier, at which time I was virtually an alcoholic. Prior to being accepted into a faculty of medicine, I took the absolute minimum number of courses needed to meet the prerequisites to apply to medicine. Needless to say, I was competing against students who had taken full degrees, and even masters degrees in mediciner related fields, yet I scored the second highest mark in this surprise test in the history of the faculty. My mark was one percentage point less than the highest. The test was a multiple choice test. I leave it to you to figure out how someone could score higher on a multiple choice test than almost all of the people who had actually studied the subject in more courses.
I was later kicked out of the school for showing about as much disrespect to the gods of the medical faculty as I am now showing you. For spome reason, the people who think they can train people to “touch” people with mental disease fail to inspire me with great respect. Funny thing, isn’t it, that all the future psychiatrists against whom I competed in the surprise test, most of whom had probably studied the subject matter more than me, scored lower than I did. I’ll give you a hint. There is a component of intelligence involved in scoring in multiple choice tests. Odd, that after just a few years of medical school, all of the not particularly intelligent students against whom I competed in the test had become so brilliant that they can determine need for treatment even in someone who passively resisted their disrespectful probing.
I was not kicked out of medical school for lunatic raving. I was their best student and they knew it. I was kicked out for refusing to accept punitive measures for “disrespecting” the glorious professors. For example, in one class, the professor told us that human neurons could not reproduce. I put up my hand and commented that neuron reproduction had been discovered in birds so it might be discovered in humans in the future. The professor couldn’t take the implication that maybe I was m ore up on the subject than she was, so instead of replying in an intelligent way, she insulted me, so I walked out of the class. The fact that I had been chemically raped by people trained in this faculty played a big role in my unwillingness to accept this insult.
I must say that I found this babyish behaviour only in the medical school. If I told a professor in the science faculty that a chiral molecule could be formed from a pure hydrocarbon with no chiral carbon, as he had informed us, by tying a knot in the chain, the reaction was one of delight.
Funny thing is, about 10 years after I was insulted and eventually kicked out, it was discovered that human neurons can reproduce.
You sit their and spout out your “authority” while I am prevented in law from taking your colleagues to court for essentially raping me.
The human mind is a free agent, and you do not understand it on some meta level such that you should have authority to label people, lock them up, or force treatment on them.
Why not lock up every known relative or friend of an organized mobster. You will have a far higher rate of protecting society than you will by allowing the quacks in hospitals say who is dangerous. You could also just keep in jail forever anyone who has comitted a violent crime. The injustice would be not one whit greater.
C.S.Lewis wrote about how wrong it is to force people to defend their freedom in a psychiatrist’s office. You can find his article in the collection known as “First and Second Things”, which is, unfortunately, out of print, but available second hand for about $50.00.
Of course, such an intellectually superior authority as yourself need not consider what someone like C.S. Lewis had to say.
When I get to bring people like you to a forum where you have no choice but to answer my charges, only the beginning of justice will have occurred.
“Chemically raped”?
Never heard that term.
It is a melodramatic term, but many antipsychotic medications (especially the first and second generation of them) have substantial, ugly, and on rare occasion, lethal side effects. This is one of the reasons why psychotics released back to the community are reluctant to take them. Sometimes, what starts out as forgetfulness leads to a state of paranoia that leads them back into a dangerous madness. I’ve seen my brother go through this failure mode at least a dozen times since 1974.
“A melodramatic term”
If a van operated by a criminal pulled up beside someone on a side street, grabbed him, and took him off to some remote site and subjected him to the treatment I was subjected to, a swat team that had the opportunity would put a bullet through the brains of the person responsible, so horrific is the violence. Yet for some reason, when you make it legal, it is suddenly, by some magic, no longer violent.
Again, I bring up slavery. It was once legal. I guess, in those days, slavery was OK, and not violent.
You call me melodramatic. I see that you have learned some of the clinician’s art of discounting a victim’s testimony by allowing only clinical words. How courageous of you to discount my testimony as “melodramatic”.
The moment in which the white coated thug attacked me, a small person weighing 130 pounds, and knocked me to the floor, tearing my shirt, followed immediately by a fat matron rushing up and injecting me with a drug as if there was a big emergency, is the singularly most informative moment of my life, to date. None of the moronic rationalizations I have read here remotely approach the significance of that revelation.
That you dismiss it as “melodramatic” is an indication of the disrespect you hold for anyone who has suffered psychiatric abuse.
Gee, isn’t interesting how homosexuality was once a disease treated by psychiatrists and now, due to a little social pressure, it has changed to a perfectly acceptable aspect of an individual’s makeup? Where else, but in psychiatry, are diseases determined by social movements? Since psychiatry is such a respectable profession, as astrology once was, can you explain how it is OK that disease states are defined by social movements?
Psychiatry and its practice is immensely useful to many groups and people. Hence it survives, ever weakened as some people are capable of viewing it with skepticism and actually believe in justice over convenience.
Isolation will certainly unhinge a person. Someone who has been subjected to involuntary psychiatric treatment is someone who has been fantastically humiliated, which is another similarity with rape. A victim of real rape, however, has other advantages, which make the effects less likely to include social withdrawal and the consequent effects of isolation. A victim of real rape lives in a society that holds that rape is a crime. Not so the victim of psychiatric rape. He has to live in a society that assumes that the violence he suffered was somehow good for him. It is the most ludicrous thing, that people can possibly think that by committing violence against a person, you can somehow make him more trusting of society.
Yes, I now know that it is not me that there’s something wrong with. It’s an unjust, unfair, bullying society that doesn’t have the guts to let me seek justice, and dismisses my description as ‘melodramatic.
BTW, that the drugs are dangerous has nothing to do with it being rape, although it incenses me that it is OK for the wealthy quack who would never dream of inviting me to her house to prescribe them as though she actually cared for me. It is that I was essentially her property to reform through chemical attack into something that satisfied her (ooo, more ‘melodramatic’ words).
Do you have the slightest spark of skepticism?
Victim (melodramatic pseudonym) you don’t see that intellignece, albeit useful, is not very useful if you are not able to check your emotions.
If your emotions control you, your intelligence is not very useful.
For example, Godel starved to dead because he refused to eat because he feared to be poisoned. Usually he eat only food tasted before by his wife. But she was forced to be hospitalized for her health problems (both were old) and he stopped to eat.
What use was his intelligence (Einstein said that walking and talking with Goedel was a privilege) if he was not able to understand that not eating would kill him anyway. What use would be intelligence if he was not able to recognize friends and people willing to take care of him?
What was not a big emercency to you (in your subjective state) was for the doctor and the nurses. It is interesting you don’t describe this not emergency. Did you started yelling to people, because they were too stupid to understand your intelligence? Did they contradicted you?
My experience say you fit the mold of an intelligent psycothic. You are self centered. You talk of your “rape” and you are unable to understand or recognize that someone could have done it in good faith. They could be wrong, sure. But in good faith. But for you it is impossible to arrive to this conclusion or ponder it a a possibility. Why? Because if you feel “raped” it must be a rape and if someone raped you, he/she must do in on purpose to have you suffer. You, simply, are unable to empatize and simpatize with others.
“Why not lock up every known relative or friend of an organized mobster. You will have a far higher rate of protecting society than you will by allowing the quacks in hospitals say who is dangerous.”
Courts have generally trusted doctors, who had no economic interest in keeping someone against their will. But commitment (as opposed to observational hold) was generally not done just on one doctor’s say-so. Some states allowed two doctors to commit, but many required a court order as well, with an opportunity for the patient to be heard. Due process was sometimes circumvented, and perhaps fixing this that would have been a better solution than the dismantling of the system.
Talk about a teachable moment: this is the time when there should be a national and international discussion about mental illness, in particular, about schizophrenia, which attacks a person in their late teens. The young man in question disappeared from his friends, and took to pot smoking etc. Alcohol and drugs are used a lot by people with schizophrenia, in their attempts to calm their shattered perceptions.
I live in the North. People with mental illness are often drawn to places they perceive as far away, places where perhaps they can feel ‘safe.’ The University of Alaska was one such place. While there, I met a girl who shaved her hair, and spend hours pasting popcorn kernels on a wall. And then, there was the girl who spent hours staring at a glass of water, and told me about ‘this guy’ who appeared and then disappeared (I KNEW ‘this guy’ was not in town at the time.) The latter had stopped taking her medications.
The killer’s website is so typical of what I think is the ravings of a schizophrenic. I would bet that his parents have tried to get him psychiatric help at the very least. They must be so very tired and sad right now.
The political punditry are not only completely cynical, but they are completely ignorant of mental illness. They are beyond disgusting.
I posted this on another article on Pajamas Media, but it is relevant to this discussion as well: What is lost in the entire discussion of the Tuscon tragedy is the fact that mental health services in this country are sorely lacking. However, as already witnessed there is now a witchunt alive against those in this country who have a mental illness. This is not about words spoken but about societal indifference until tragedy strikes. Something must be done to get those who are dangerously ill the help they need while protecting the civil liberties of the average person with a mental illness who is no danger to themselves or any other human being. For shame on the country for missing the true issue surrounding this tragedy.
“However, as already witnessed there is now a witchunt alive against those in this country who have a mental illness.”
Huh? Unfortunately, the problem of mental illness is generally ignored in this country until people are scared. That’s a tragedy.
The rate of people freezing to death in the U.S. more than doubled from 1974 to 1984. My analysis of the demographics of those who died, as well as a detailed hypothermia deaths study in D.C., suggests that this was one of the consequences of deinstitutionalization–a lot of people released to the streets, where they froze to death.
Oregon has had a lot of incidents where psychotic people have starved themselves to death while family and authorities looked on helplessly–prohibited by law from intervening.
Well now you have Old Soldier. It is more rape than real rape when you are beaten up and immediately injected with a drug that makes you feel so sick that you believe you are dying. Then, you are under treatment. No period of observation. The lords of the institution who are your “doctors” never even saw you before you were under their treatment.
There is a phenomenon whereby people who are supposedly mentally ill are not allowed to use words as metaphors, as everyone does, to describe their experience.
Yes, it was chemical rape. A penetration occurred. As with real rape, the major harm is that it is an attack on the victim’s mind. With real rape, this effect is secondary. With a victim of chemical rape, the chemical is specifically designed to attack the mind. That is why it is more rape than real rape. As with real rape, there can also be physical harm, as the drugs used are dangerous.
I will tell you this. Before this happened to me, I thought there was something wrong with me. I was shunned and disrespected. I grew up in a shitty little hockey town, where if you weren’t a jock, you were a nobody. I scored the highest average in the sciences in my school division even though I had such a bad drinking problem in my last year that I had three blackouts (you do not remember what you did). I was brainier than all the other kids, which just increased their disrespect.
After I had been beaten up and chemically raped for three months, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t me there was something wrong with. It was the society I lived in. If you can’t grock that as a sane comment, just imagine a slave concluding that there was nothing wrong with him, but with the slave holding society.
I wonder, Old Soldier, if you have the slightest clue that I deserve the right to demand answers from a system that does to people what it did to me?
Hey, I’m not putting you down. I really didn’t know.
As someone who has been physically and mentally abused by my mother (my suicide attempts started at age 9 and continued on throughout my early life), molested by both family and babysitters, raped later as a virgin 17 year old and hospitalized in a state mental institution after a nervous break-down by the age of 18, I can certainly agree that psychiatrists are ego-manical @ssholes who are clueless pr*cks but, I take umbrage with your insinuation that being forced to take a drug is the same as rape.
As much as I wished one of the psychiatrists would give me some sort of drug, they wouldn’t (I was one of the only patients on the whole ward who did not receive any meds), because they were confused by me and couldn’t diagnose me right because I was playing with their heads the whole time (partly for my amusement and partly because I thought they were complete, egotistical asshats). The only person who truly (and I mean, TRULY) listened to me there was a psychologist who allowed me to open up to him and pour my life story out to him in great detail to the point where he was shocked I hadn’t ended up in some nut-bin earlier. lol So, he became my champion and got me out of there but not before I got a staff member fired for not only physically molesting me but raping a repeat patient who was traumatized so badly by being drugged and raped by her assailant that she ended up back where he could attack her again (and the only reason she told me so was when I told her the same guy was cornering me in the laundry room to forcibly feel me up and she finally broke down crying and telling me her story and I told said psychologist and he believed us both, we wrote witness statements and that scum was fired).
Rape of ANY kind is a violation to be sure, but, please don’t be so quick to act as if ‘mental rape’ is worse than ‘physical rape’ unless you have experienced ‘physical rape’, because, believe me pal, I’ve experienced both (my mother pretty much forced me to smoke pot with her at age 11 which destroyed my ability to learn a lot of shit until much later in my life), so, let’s not get too much into semantics to the point where you feel you need to negate one type of ‘rape’ in order to ‘prop-up’ your own brand. That’s kinda assholey imho.
“Victim” is a really bummer name to hang around your neck like an albatross here, btw. Give yourself a decent monker for cryin’ out loud (you deserve that much).
I hope you are taking care of yourself. I think your drinking problem was probably to keep your over-thinking from consuming you to the point of making you feel helpless (just my two cents).
Don’t ever give up.
I was beat up and penetrated with a needle. I physically felt and believed I was dying, something which I have never felt before or since. I was possessed by someone else whose object was to totally subject me to her will (through her proxy thugs and chemicals). If that’s not physical, I don’t know what would be.
The people responsible for a system who does this cannot be reformed into something benign, any more than you can make a silk purse out of sow’s ear. They need to fall to the same level of social respect and power as chiropracters.
I’m sorry that your life has been so hard. There a lot of depraved, utterly evil people amongst the “normals”. As Clayton Cramer informs us, even some mass murderers are sane. I don’t think so myself, I don’t think there exists a sane line of reasoning from non delusional premises that can lead to a conclusion that mass murder is OK, but then Cramer is an “expert” on sanity.
Or maybe he just isn’t a very good thinker. After all, he informs us that statistics tell us that when the hospitals were emptied, murder rates went up. Yet he argues elsewhere that murder can be done for “sane” reasons. Most of the murders I read about are done for “sane” reasons – drug wars, fights over prestige, thefts gone wrong, brawls between gangs, crime family wars and punishments, etc., etc., etc. They mostly can be understood from the point of view of motive, means, and opportunity, which is to say they are “sane”. We would have to be able to pick out a _significant_ increase in the statistical “signal” of insane murders from the massive background statistical “noise” of “sane” murders. A person who was concerned with getting the right answer rather than just slamming an already highly disadvantaged and oppressed group would actual have to check the murder rate from former institutional inmates rather than just look at the huge undifferentiated number which is the total murder rate in society. Of course, I would expect the total murder rate to go up when hundreds of thousands of imprisoned people are release for exactly the same reason I would expect the murder rate to go up in a desert if a dropped in a hundred thousand medical doctors (some doctors are mass murderers, although we would have to call them “sane” mass murderers because they probably do them for some perverted sexual pleasure. Lot’s of medical doctors are rapists, you know, so it wouldn’t surprise me that some of them have a perverted sexual drive which causes them to get sexual pleasure from murdering patients).
You can’t go around locking people up, or taking their rights away, just because they’re eccentric.
It’s not like this guy, Loughner, had a lengthy criminal record, or had been in and out of mental institutions.
I don’t see that there’s much you can do to prevent a case like this.
This is a far cry from a case like the Polly Klaas murder where a career scumbag, violent criminal, and psychopath was released over and over again by the state of California…until he finally kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered a little girl.
This is more of a case of a guy acting a little strangely, and then all of a sudden going crazy and shooting a bunch of people. Not much you can do in a case like that.
At least that’s how it appears to me given the current (limited) state of information available.
Don’t we understand, though, that the community college he was attending was able to compel him to leave and not return until he could document steps towards mental rehabilitation? I’m assuming he must have done something (or some series of things) that seriously alarmed them, to take such a step, and to inform his parents about it. (It was one of the Virginia Tech problems that the school in that case never informed Cho’s parents about the problems they were having with them, due to “privacy” concerns. Funny, that “privacy” concerns don’t come up, when the school wants the parents to know full well what the kid’s tuition and board fees are!)
There is a difference between eccentric and psychotic. A big difference. At one time, a person could be adjudicated mentally ill, with enough evidence, and that would have been sufficient to add him to the “no guns” list. I do not want this process to be too easy–but as it currently stands, we are far away from it being too easy.
The Virginia Tech shooter managed to avoid an involuntary commitment, thus making him eligible to purchase guns. Would an involuntary commitment have absolutely prevented him from getting a gun? No. Would it have made it more difficult? Yes. Might it have delayed or discouraged him? Hard to say for sure.
Let me emphasize that the mass murder problem is only a tiny part of the argument against deinstitutionalization. The strongest argument is what happens to the mentally ill who spend their lives on the streets, forming a large fraction of the homeless, dying of exposure and random acts of violence.
My wife often has to walk through a gauntlet of the mentally unhinged on her way home from work. They seem to congregate around the park benches near the PATH train station. I always watch closely as she passes through them (to where I pick her up in the car), as I remember a particular incident of a young woman (in NYC) who got her head bashed in by a mentally deranged man. His motivation? The young woman was ‘just there’.
These people eventually commit crimes (some minor.. some violent) and eventually get picked up by the police. They get medicated, stop taking their medication, and come full circle as they end up on that park bench again. These are people who are mentally to far gone (born that way or from years of drug addiction, or both) to run their own lives.
For our sake and theirs, the mentally incompetent need to be re-institutionalized. Even with my rather libertarian bent on the responsibilities with government; mental institutions (like prisons) is a legitimate function of government.
The “drug Addiction” is more likely self medication:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2011/01/i-blame-drug-war.html
In 1969 I was a psychology intern at Chicago Read Mental Health Center, a large state hospital and outpatient treatment center in Chicago. During my training the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill began and some of my patients, upon being discharged to the tender mercies of the Chicago streets by “civil rights” activists committed suicide. I never knew of anyone in that hospital who wasn’t severely disturbed and needed to be there. I applaud Mr. Cramer for attempting to get a book published about the evils of de-institutionalization and wish him luck. I tried about 25 years ago and never could get anything published. People are more comfortable with a large ‘homless’ population, primarilly made up of mentally ill and/or drug abusers, or plain irresponsible people than they are of institutions that actually help the severely mentally ill. All the reports in the press about Jared Lee lead to the same conclusion – he is a paranoid schizophrenic who has been severely disturbed for many years. The fact that he has fixated on left-wing politics doesn’t change the fact that he is severely mentally ill and couldn’t carry on a logical discussion of any political viewpoint, right, left, or center, because his illness has so corrupted his mind. He needs to be locked up for life in a secure mental facility like Hinckley was after attempting to assasinate Reagan. It is tragic that we will continue to learn how many people realized he was homicidally disturbed and did essentially nothing to try and get him seen by mental health professionals. Evidently his parents were scared to death of him and with good reason. It could as easily have been them that he murdererd as Rep. Giffords. He needed treatment years ago and unfortunately, it is very difficult to obtain in Arizona.
Patricia A. Helvenston, Ph.D.
Since this isn’t a medical blog, but a political one, may I return to the political issue in front of us?
Wouldn’t you say then that Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and others were also “paranoid schizophrenic, severely disturbed for many years and also fixated on leftist (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot)/nazi (Hitler) ideas”?
If so, isn’t then safe to argue that being fixated on ideas which lead to murder and meyhem of the scale these idividuals were able to perpetrate on humanity, renders them both criminally liable as well as mentally insane?
And finally, would you agree that these fine gentlemen, if apprehended, should have been summarily tried and if found guilty (!) executed for at least crimes against humanity, and not be committed to a mental institution, subject to “di-institutionalization”?
I would be interested in your thoughts – partly because these observations regarding psychotic/paranoid/schizophrenic behavior are applicable to some individuals currently in power in DC and to some of their acolytes.
POli Sci
“Wouldn’t you say then that Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and others were also “paranoid schizophrenic, severely disturbed for many years and also fixated on leftist (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot)/nazi (Hitler) ideas”?”
NO you could not. The fixation on this or that idea does not make you paranoid schizophrenic. It may make you paranoid, but not schizophrenic.
If so, isn’t then safe to argue that being fixated on ideas which lead to murder and meyhem of the scale these idividuals were able to perpetrate on humanity, renders them both criminally liable as well as mentally insane?
Mental insanity may not be a paranoid schizophrenia. One does not equals other.
And finally, would you agree that these fine gentlemen, if apprehended, should have been summarily tried and if found guilty (!) executed for at least crimes against humanity, and not be committed to a mental institution, subject to “di-institutionalization”?
I would not, because they were (most probably) not mentally ill. Further if the killing of many people automatically makes one “insane” then Napoleon, Cezar and the leaders of conquering Islamic armies in ,for example, India should be called insane due to the number of killings done by their armies
If your definition of “mentally insane” “psychopath” “paranoid schizophrenic” doesn’t include these cases, maybe your definitions need re-defining.
Speaking of islam, if islamic terrorism isn’t part of being “mentally ill” then something again is wrong with the definition. As an example, the “prophet” of islam “marrying” a six year old girl is a symptom of mental illness in my book.
But my basic point is this: because all these acts by all those (and others even currently in position of power) lunatics are acts of mentally sick people, it doesn’t follow that they aren’t criminals, and if apprehended they should have been tried, and if found guilty of these or similar acts, be summarily executed instead of being committed to a mental facility with the possibility of eventually being “de-institutionalized.”
There are advantages to using standard definitions. It makes useful communication possible.
“Wouldn’t you say then that Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and others were also “paranoid schizophrenic,”
No. No evidence of schizophrenia at all. Dangerous, evil, perhaps syphilitic insanity in the case of Hitler (there have been questions).
We have the quacks who are to be counted as experts, and then there are the victims of these quacks who are to be ignored because they are crazy.
Explain to me why I have no right to take the people like you who did to me what they did to court to defend their actions. Explain to me why it is written into the laws of the various jurisdictions that you are safe from any charges from me.
I’m a bit surprised that you think that you have no basis for suit, unless it because of statute of limitations. See O’Connor v. Donaldson (1975).
“You can’t go around locking people up, or taking their rights away, just because they’re eccentric.”
Eccentric is not psychotic. There is a difference. While the line separating psychosis from eccentricity is not spectacularly crisp, most people can figure out the difference adequately.
As far as I can see, the guy didn’t do anything to merit being locked up or have his rights taken away UNTIL he shot a bunch of people.
That’s why he’s locked up now (and, of course he ought to be, whether he’s adjudged psychotic or not).
Until he opened fire, all he’d done is acted like an eccentric…at least that’s how it appears to me.
According to wiki…
“From February to September 2010, Loughner had five contacts with Pima Community College police for classroom and library disruptions. On September 29, 2010, college police discovered a Loughner-filmed YouTube video in which he claimed that the college was illegal according to the United States Constitution. The college told Loughner that if he wanted to come back to school, he needed to resolve his Code of Conduct violations and obtain a mental health clearance indicating, in the opinion of a mental health professional, that his presence did not constitute a danger to himself or others. Instead he withdrew from Pima.”
“According to court records, Loughner had two previous offenses, one of which was for drug paraphernalia possession.[3] In October 2007, Loughner was cited in Pima County for possession of drug paraphernalia, which was dismissed after he completed a diversion program, according to online records. A year later he was charged with an unknown “local charge” in Marana near Tucson. That charge was also dismissed following the completion of a diversion program in March 2009, the Daily Star reported.”
That’s the extent of the guy’s record (as far as I know)…and that’s not even close to enough to merit stripping the guy of his rights, or locking him up in a mental institution.
Again, we don’t have all the information, and maybe this guy has more trouble in his past than is being reported, but, based on the information I’ve seen…there’s nothing we could reasonably have done to prevent this.
You can’t strip people of their rights, or lock them up based on a couple of minor drug offenses and the fact that they acted goofy, and disrupted classes in college. IMO, of course.
“When I was young, random acts of mass murder were shocking. In 1966, Charles Whitman went to the top of a building at the University of Texas and methodically murdered 13 people with a rifle.”
Yeah, and that’s another case of a guy who really didn’t have any extensive criminal record or mental health issues that would have merited locking him up…UNTIL he flipped out and killed a bunch of people.
The only trouble he was ever in (that I know of) was that he was once court martialed in the Marines for some minor offenses.
So, how are you going to prevent a guy like that from doing what he did?
The answer is is that you are NOT going to prevent it. All you’re going to do is clean up the mess after it’s over, because that’s all you can do.
Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.
He had also been seeing a psychiatrist for some time and was on a prescription. So, he did have mental issues and was being seen by a mental health “professional.”
He saw a psychiatrist exactly one time, right before he went totally nuts and started blasting people, and he had a prescription for valium that he got from a regular doctor who had referred him to the psychiatrist.
That was the extent of Whitman’s mental health issues…until he started shooting.
At least that’s what the stories I’m reading right now say.
Very true. There are no perfect solutions. But many of these are situations like this guy, who gave clear indications of serious mental illness. Had he been hospitalized and stabilized, there is a good chance he might have been calmed down enough to not do this. At least, a commitment would have put him on the “no guns” list. Better than nothing.
I too, have a family member who suffers from mental illness to. We got as many different diagnoses as he saw doctors. The early days were a series of medications that either didn’t work or had such horrible side effects that he couldn’t stand to take them.
After finding one that worked, or at least worked for a while, he would get a job and attempt to make it on his own again. He wanted to work very badly, but when he worked he would make too much money, be dumped from SSI, become unable to afford his medications and end up in the jail/hospital again. (And yes, many of our prison inmates are actually mentally ill by the testimony of the police officers we spoke to during these times.)
This is a cycle of which most families of the mentally ill are aware. We never gave up on him and kept after the various professionals, public and private(when we could afford it) to find something that worked. We were constantly hampered by government regulations preventing his doctors from telling us what was going on and preventing us from telling them the same.
He never became violent(except for damaging things accidently because he is a very strong man.)but his behavior, when not on medication, was not the most conducive to maintaining friendships. (Needless to say, we truly value those people who have been his friends consistently over the years.)
Now, he has been stable and productive (He volunteers since working for pay causes problems)for several years. We credit this to those doctors who worked with us to find a medication/medications that worked and the judge who carefully considered his history and ordered that he be given his medication regularly in lieu of being locked up.
This and the continual support of family and friends made all the difference. Had he been violent, it would have been a different story, and rightly so.
This is a necessary topic. I hope you can get your book published. There is no one “right” way to deal with this challenge, because every individual is, well, an individual. Some things may work for many, but nothing will work for all. Institutionalization, when appropriate, is the best path for some, but applying a cookie cutter won’t work any better with mental illness than it does for any other kind of illness.
Completely agreed. There are psychotics who are not a threat to others, and can be adequately managed in a non-institutional setting. There are others who can be managed through what is called involuntary outpatient commitment. There are others that are dangerous, and need to be hospitalized at least long enough to be stabilized.
And how do we “manage” people like you, who strain with all your might to have people subjected to the whim of psychiatric quackery?
Christ, I tire of your unfairness.
Get this. I will never cooperate with a psychiatrist. And if the bugger decides to lock me up and force treatment on me anyway, will that be OK in your books? I never cooperated with any psychiatrist before I was beaten and raped (sorry you don’t like me to use “melodramatic” words). I was totally passive.
I told you or someone here to read about the famous Marine study that demonstrated that when people are incarcerated, they get abused. You can easily find it using Google. Did you? Did you research the C.S.Lewis article I referred you to in “First and Second Things”?
Do you know what having this conversation with you is for me? It’s emotional hell. It’s hell because I am talking to someone who is quite fine with the raping and torture that has gone on in psychiatric institutions for centuries.
You take a person who is supposedly paranoid and untrusting. Then you subject him to the treatment that if you personally were subjected to by criminals you would find horrific. And somehow, by some magic, that abuse is supposed to make the subject of it begin to trust and feel less paranoia?
Your brother takes drugs and then he can help his mother? Guess what? I don’t want a life like that, and who the Hell has the right to say that that is satisfactory for me than me.
I would rather freeze to death in the streets than be subjected to being “managed” by some ignorant pig who is running a modern Spanish Inquisition. If you were my brother, I would run very hard from you. And yes, having to run from people who want to “manage” uproots people and makes it far more likely they will end up filthy and dead somewhere.
All the evil in the world has been done by people who are damned sure of what they have to do to other people.
Are you aware that I am a human being? I’m supposed to have human rights, but I can’t even get into a courtroom. It makes me sick to the stomach when I see the real nuts of our society complaining about something like Saddam Hussein being shown in his underpants as a human rights violation, or someone like Mark Steyn being taken to court by a supposed “Human Rights Commission” for quoting Muslims, and I have a real human rights complaint as do thousands and thousands of other victims of this brutish, ignorant society that is so doltish that it can’t even figure out that doing violence to people only harms them.
People say that repeating the same behaviour that doesn’t work is an insane behaviour. Well, you’ve had your brother to the psychiatrist multiple times, but you can’t generate a clue that maybe you’ve done that enough and it doesn’t work. Maybe you should leave your brother alone and respect him as a human being, even if he kills himself in the end. That would show him some decent respect. But no, you would “manage” him like an animal so that in a drugged state he can help his mother. Neither you nor your mother actually care much about him if you are satisfied with that. You are just looking after your own feelings and guilt.
I have 16 plus years experience in social services. Nearly 8 years of it working as a mental health caseworker. I resigned from my job nearly two years ago because of the abuses, scams and waste I saw within the mental health system. I have commented on this very thing several times over the last few days on other blogs.
We have changed the way we have dealt with the mentally ill in America. We have emptied the hospitals and are forcing severe mentally ill people into community living situations, where they live alone in apartments with nothing more than a weekly visit from a caseworker. I am telling you, this is the thing Republicans need to focus on. We have ticking time bombs living among us. People who 25 years ago would have been institutionalized for their own safety as well as the communities safety, and instead, we are allowing them to live in our neighborhoods. People who have severe hallucinations, fantasies of killing sprees, severe paranoia and engage in criminal activity but their actions are overlooked since the have a MH diagnosis.
The mental health system is a failure in America. Caseworkers are pressured to keep their MH clients out of the hospitals. You cannot justify budgets for community MH services if your MH individuals are always being admitted into the hospital.
I repeat… the mental hospitals have been emptied and the severe mentally ill are living in our neighborhoods. I don’t care what this sounds like.. it is the truth.
Poly Sci:
Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, etc.etc. were not paranoid schizophrenics they were all psychopaths – while people with each diagnosis have been known to commit horrible crimes, schizophrenia is characterized by hallucinations, delusions, thought disorder, at times severe apathy and depression, feelings of emptiness, being controlled by “brain washing” etc. Loughner is much more consistent behaviorally with a diagnosis of schizophrenia — which in many people is characterized by a progressive deterioration. This may be his first psychotic episode although he is described as having been weird for some years.
I hope your book is published. The chapter on Colonial America was fascinating, and you make the whole topic very accessible to laypersons.
It is interesting that a WalMart employee pretended to be out of the bullets the killer wanted to buy. The killer went to a second Walmart outlet and purchased the bullets. That first employee should be interviewed and asked what he/she saw when Lougher (?) appeared at the store. I am aghast at the foolish opining, going on in ‘respectable’ media: asking (fergawdsakes) Why?? And carrying on about ‘gun control.’ And ratcheting up ‘security’ for ‘government servants.’ Now, who is insane anyway? A genuine responsible media would wait for a couple of hours at least, before raging on about Sarah Palin (!!!)
And the real issue is the treatment of people with mental illness in our societies.
The murderer of Seattle (that killed Mike Huckabee’s political future, along with four cops) and the murderer of Arizona (that just killed Sarah Palin’s political future, along with six others) were “mental cases” by “random” nutjobs, that somehow came in handy for this regime.
Very “lucky” these Chicago politicians, aren’t they?
What other “chance events” await us before 2012?
Nope. About 1.5% of the adult population suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. Most will never be violent, but if even 5% of that 4.5 million become violent, that’s 225,000 people. Most of that 5% will never become a national headline–but at any given time, there are hundreds of thousands of ticking timebombs out there.
The guy who shot John Lennon. The guy who shot President Reagan. The guy who went into the U.S. Capitol. The guy who went into the church in Colorado Springs a couple of years ago. The lawyer Baumhammers, who shot five people because they were immigrants. Sylvia Seegrist. Laurie Dann. Patrick Purdy. And lots and lots of local tragedies that you have never heard of, because they only killed one or two people, often family members.
Most will only be a hazard to themselves. Schizophrenics tend to die younger than average, of accidents, exposure, or victims of violence themselves. But you don’t need any dark conspiracy to explain the rate of tragedies.
From the discussions of Pol Pot, Hitler, “left” vs. “right,” it is clear that some commenters here really do not know what terms like “psychosis” and “schizophrenia” mean. See pp. 7-13 of http://www.claytoncramer.com/PersonalTragediesTeaser.pdf for a non-technical explanation.
You seem to be dismissing in a rather cavalier manner the knowledge and points a number of “these commenters” make.
Any profession’s definitions aren’t written in stone, and they critically depend on the prevailing establishment’s ideological views on these issues.
For you to argue that somehow monsters like Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot weren’t mentally sick, opens up your own credibility to questioning.
Evil and mental illness aren’t the same thing.
How so?
There are a lot of delusional people out there who have strange, quite whacky ideas, but they are not dangerous to anyone–maybe not even to themselves. I used to know someone who would talk at great length about her time in a concentration camp during World War II, after she was locked up (with her family) in Norway by the Nazis.
The problem was: she was born in America, never in Norway, but was quite convinced that this was true. She wasn’t evil. She was mentally ill.
Because not all “mentally ill” persons are dangerous to others or themselves, it doesn’t mean that all “mentally ill” persons are so.
But all those who are dangerous to society are mentally ill AND criminals (or at least have criminal intent as long as they haven’t acted).
The term “evil” is a religious one, whereas the terms “mentally ill” and “criminal” are secular terms in the Justice System and in the medical profession(s). Parenthetically, I’m a religious person.
I’m glad somebody recognizes the problems in the mental health care field and is trying to address some of them. My husband and I live with, and try to care for, a 35 year old son that is severely mentally ill. People that live with the problems know exactly what we go through every day, people that don’t can’t really grasp the problems to understand. (It’s like owning a loaded shot gun that can discharge on it’s own at random times and cannot be controlled.) Thank God for the people that try to help.
Trying to care for a mentally ill family member is incredibly difficult and stressful, especially if you are in the same home, and you have reason to be afraid. No one does it perfectly. You do the best you can.
Pam, Clayton,
Yes!
Of course Clayton already knows since we have discussed the matter extensively by e-mail.
*heavy sigh*
Well the shooter was self medicating with pot and alcohol. He quit self medicating in August 2010 and rapidly went down hill.
I blame drug prohibition.
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2011/01/i-blame-drug-war.html
Self medication is a BAD idea beyond a very small threshold. No one responsibly advocates it, because it will not help a worsening condition. None of us is perfect, and we all need one or more second opinions beyond our own.
I buy that to some extent. Which is why alcohol should be illegal because some folks (like the shooter) self medicate with it. That is not a joke. It is sarcasm.
OTOH the drugs that schizophrenics respond to vary greatly. So if pot seems to work for some (documented at my above link) why isn’t it available? Oh. Yeah. Because we need a drug war that makes it easier for kids to get an illegal drug than a legal beer.
Now I understand that pot makes the condition of some schizophrenics worse. But that is true of all the drugs currently available for the problem. Response is very individual.
We had a friend that we catered to when no one else would that was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and in my mind she was a danger to others as well as her self and she always carried a pistol with her,” a friend of mind removed the firing pin from that gun long ago which she never knew, well to make a long story short She got involved with a man named Steve and he had a sawed off shot gun in his home and when he decided to let her move in with her I told him not to let any shells lay around and to keep her away from the guns that he might have in his home.. He mentioned to me about the pistol she carried around and I forgot about the firing pin being removed.. Well him and her would butt heads from time to time and when she would get in one of those moods she needed to get away we would open our home up to her for some refuge, needless to say she could be a hand full at times but I felt with in my heart I should be her friend in times of trouble.. My wife and I was in Ma. at the time and we lived in Pa. and she called our cell phone wanting to come and stay for a while with us when she would have trouble in her mind and in the week of that conversation she took the sawed off shot gun and shot her self in the chest.. it broke our hearts People like her and this fellow should never be allowed to purchase fire arms or ammo
What could go wrong, a schizophrenic with a gun (sans firing pin) and a guy with an illegal sawed-off shotgun?
With all due respect, both individuals should have been reported to the police.
I have been a social worker at one of those state hospitals for over three decades. While I have some agreement with ideas here, there are some important missing pieces.
1. Retrospective analysis, which says “Oh of course someone would have locked this person up if they had come to their attention,” is unreliable. Predicting dangererousness in advance is much harder than one would think. The alarming types of statements reported here are not as good a predictor as one would imagine. I have had over 3000 patients altogether, and likely above 500 who make statements like these. None of them has murdered anyone.
2. When you get the bill for locking people up at the rate we used to, you will abandon your idea immediately. My hospital is cheap at $900/day. Plus, the many people who are rapidly treated and return to work – I’m going to say 20-25% of involuntary admissions – are going to be lost to the economy. Admittedly, the percentage of paranoid schizophrenics returning to work is far less.
3. There is the matter of individual right to freedom if one has not demonstrated dangerousness. How far down that road do you want to go?
4. As to those who refuse medicine and other treatment because they deny their illness (inability to construct a new narrative and explanation for events, even in the face of contradicting data, is a symptom of several mental illnesses – likely related to depressed activity in certain brain regions, not stubbornness or fear), I agree that the problem is enormous. Welcome to my job. I don’t see any neat and simple solutions to it. All interventions which might solve it, as yours, carry nasty side-effects as well, some worse than the original problem.
to #58 AVI: It is a valid point – how to pay for it? Well, we used to be able to afford it, so why couldn’t we now? If people were concerned about it, I am sure a way could be found.
Unfortunately, too few people are concerned about it. Too few have any experience with the mentally ill and have no idea what it is all about. They will talk about this case for maybe a week, and then it will fall off the radar screen.
My wife used to do what you do. You have my sympathy, and my thanks.
AVI,
Cost is the issue here.
New York closed it’s long term facilities after a number of court decisions forced extended outptatient treatment of some mentally ill patients but the real reason for closing these hospitals was cost. The rapid deinstitutionalization of mentally ill in NY state resulted in tremendous savings for the government, the legislators saw this and set up the mass exodus from the hospitals.
The other thing that occurred in NY and other states was localizing mental health care, usually to counties and cities, which placed the financial burden on these smaller entities. The same thing happened with hospitals for developmentally developed persons. They were deemed to be too costly and severely mentally retarded wards of the state were sent to group homes for care with the counties footing the bill.
As a result there were significant losses in treatment availability and networking which has only been partially recovered by county mental health centers.
There were egregious abuses of the mental health system. Patients were the subjects of medical experimentation (often not related to psychiatry) without consent, people were committed and the paperwork lost for the rest of their lives – often on purpose so the POA could spend their money, diagnositic mistakes were made that incarcerated patients for decades (one famous one in TX involved a man who could not speak English, the doctors thought he was psychotic), and patients were treated like cattle often being washed in the same facilities that pig farmers used to keep their pens clean. These situations resulted in the legal situation we see today as a result of reform in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. The state hospitals didn’t help themselves even though many were humane and effective.
In today’s fiscal and legal environment no one is going to be kept in a hospital for very long and no one is going to pay for it with few exceptions.
Source? Everything I can find indicates that a mix of a belief that community mental health care worked better and some legal action by the ACLU, was the primary motivation. There was almost no discussion of the costs, and when there was, it was usually stated as a secondary concern. The costs were high, of course, but what replaced the old system wasn’t cheap, either.
The claims about intentionally locking people up to spend their money sounds like Bruce Ennis’ Prisoners of Psychiatry–a profoundly unpersuasive book.
At a minimum, a person who has given good reason to be concerned about their contact with reality should not have access to deadly weapons, at least until there is reason to believe the problem has been solved. Abandonment of the commitment process because it is so difficult precludes this possibility. Of course, many people who are hospitalized are not psychotic, and may not need such a limitation.
You think prisons, jails, homeless shelters (the other places that many end up), don’t cost anything? Picking up dead homeless people after a subfreezing night isn’t free, either. The cost of a murder trial can run into six figures very rapidly. It does not take took many of these incidents to gobble up a lot of money.
And yes, the paranoid schizophrenics aren’t returning to work.
Closer to 1960 than we are now.
Good article. Being a liberal is a mental disease for which there is no cure.
Aaron Klein of World Net Daily did an exclusive article Monday 1-10-11 on Bill Ayers, communist provided Arizona shooter’s cirriculim funded by Obama.
It is verified and true. The left is going nuts covering up for this loon who is a Democrat and Liberal. They even went so far as to make up a statement that he was an Independent since trying to even go near saying he was a Republican was not going to work.
The duplicity of these frauds in unbelievable!
IMHO, what is missing is a third category. The police in this instance made a judgment that committing Loughner or attempting to ‘could make things worse.’ The retrospectusscope now allows us to wonder, really, how much worse it could have been. OTOH, in AZ and elsewhere probably not all rattlesnakes are best messed with. We have a tradition of religious liberty and being able to say what you think in this country. Spinoza, an excommunicated Jew in Amsterdam, first well enunciated these principles in a book he wrote in Latin. Ideally, there would have been a legal procedure by which Loughner could have been denied the right for a while to own or buy a gun. He could have been allowed to think crazy thoughts like Spinoza if he preferred.
heathermc seems to be saying that possible indentification of troubled indications is possible from their online postings (assuming such exist) .
If rules for such identications could be formulated perhaps some automated identification system could be made . This would allow troubled individuals to be identified . Hopefully the system would be run by a charitable or religious organization and would offer help, at least someone to talk to (sort of like the suicide lines) . Perhaps if such an organization concluded there was a real danger they might contact local law enforcement. It’s not much but it is something . Hopefully we as a society can do better, but it almost certainly has to be community by community (or state by state).
When you mentioned some organization (perhaps) that could be the hub of this type of care, I think of The Salvation Army. They already deal with homeless people, people who are alcoholics, lost or wandering teenagers, older people in need, plus a lot more. They are a church of long standing years. When you give to them practically all of your money goes to help people. When you see new building go up by The Salvation Army, that money was designated for that particular need. Right now there are many Kroc Centers (the Mac Donald heiress) being built that take in all aspects of life. The Lord will provide. Please take note EVERYONE.
As the mother of Clayton’s brother Ron, I am happy to tell you that there are many people ‘with Schiophrenia illness’ who can live in this world as a free man. No kinder a man do I know than my son Ron who shares our home (just Ron and me). It has been 7 years since Ron has been in a hospital. Trust ‘in me’ and injections of Proxlin every 2 weeks has been the answer. He helps me (I am 94) with all the shopping, banking, most of the cooking, chores that I cannot handle, and still can be a friendly guy. All people like him and he has many friends in our community.
This son (as well as Clayton) has a brain that is full of information which is readily recalled. Ron came down with Schizophrenia when he was 28 after teaching electronics in the U.S. Army at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. His breakdown came when he was at U.C.L.A. getting all ‘A’s in Economics, Calculus, Physics and making the Dean’s List.
Yes, during the years since age 28 he has been in and out of hospitals, off his medication many times (he did not think he needed it). Homeless for a number of times, unable to communicate with Social Security to keep his Disability checks coming; these were some of his problems. Strange talk, frightening people, and other problems.
I am glad to let you know that there is hope for many of those who have this dread illness. He is not well, and may never be but he is kind, thoughtful, pleased with his life even though it has been lacking in many ways. He is not envious of things that others in his family have.
A trust in someone can make all the difference. The injections are helpful. “We” have navigated this mixed up Mental Health maze together.
Thanks for sharing that information with us, Ms. Cramer.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to cure debilitating mental conditions like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder someday, but in the meantime, I prefer to see people not locked up in mental institutions, whenever their condition allows them to live outside of an institutional setting.
Good luck to you, and your son, and I’m terribly sorry that everyone in the Cramer family has had to go through all this.
Schizophrenia and Tobacco
Schizophrenics use tobacco for self medication. And yet we keep raising tobacco taxes with no exemption for medical use.
What’s the correct dosage?
I’ve been doing about 2 1/2 packs a day for 40 years.
On the plus side, I’ve never been locked up in a looney bin.
But, on the negative side, I’ve developed emphysema.
On balance, I would advise against using tobacco for medicinal purposes.
I think you have a point there, sir. A sad situation exists for people with schizophrenia and who also smoke. Many people have smoked for years and lived to be 96 (my grandpa was one of them). Many people get lung cancer who have never smoked. Inhaling tobacco smoke may cause cancer of the lungs. Personally ‘I’ have been around people who smoked a lot – actually more than 2/3 of my long life. I am now 94 and in good health. Just close every place that has people, in the park, in the restaurant and you see what happens to those businesses. You also see the guys and gals who stand out in the rain and wind to have their cigarettes.
Then there is that terrific cost – out of the world in price these days. I do not smoke and never have. I recognize the habit is dirty, costly, and upsetting to a lot of people. What harm is there for mentally ill people to be able to calm their nerves with cigarettes and coffee?
A lot of people these days like to dream up things that everyone else should do, or eat, or say, or………
There is some evidence that Radon causes lung cancer! My Step father that never smoked at all died of lung cancer. But so did one of my uncles who quit smoking at about age 40 and died at about 78! This is just anecdotal I know but that is what I have seen in my life!
Oh yeah and my wife had lung cancer, which was cured but she also had brain tumors and was put in a hospice where she developed pneumonia for the third time in a year and that is what she did not recover from!
#59Fed-up.
Uh. How exactly can you determine the politics of a paranoid schizophrenic?
Because person X is mentally ill, or paranoid schizophrenic, or a psychopath, or whatever the “science” of Psychiatry defines him/her to be, it doesn’t necessarily follow that X doesn’t possess a political view.
That political view might not fall into neatly defined limits and models, and it might be fuzzy; but all humans espouse a political view, including the purest of the anarchists (which is most likely the case of the Arizona shooter).
Further, many of the beliefs found in leftist ideologies are delusional, not based on empirical evidence (like the communist utopia) and clearly within the realm of “mental illness.”
One even might argue that to be a mental case might imply leftist views, and leftist views might imply mental illness.
The author of the article, which generated considerable discussion and feedback, mentioned his inability to find a publisher for his book.
I have a plausible reason for this “failure” from my past experience as an Editor and referee for books and articles submitted to Publishing Houses and Journals respectively: primarily it must be due to the author’s underlying ideology which could be in contrast to the prevailing ideology in his field. Secondarily, the market for such a book might not be strong, although the recent incident in Arizona and the ensued national discussion on politics and mental illness might positively affect that part of the problem.
Don’t forget Sylvia Seegrist who committed assault and vandalism and whose mother desperately tried to commit her before she killed three people and wounded several others at the Springfield Mall in 1985.
There has been more honesty, insight, and thoughtfulness in this article, particularly in the comments, than all the tripe which confuses our national discourse. Like many, I have lived with a family member who was insane. As a boss, I had the responsibility to forbid an employee from entering a nuclear power plant. That is a heavy responsibility; it can end a talented career, normally due to booze, drugs, or mental instability. I may have made bad decisions, but the alternative was another Chernobyl. (Strong personality conflicts were irrelevant to this decision.) And I have a close friend who is an underpaid counselor in a state hospital for the criminally insane. Her patients are unstable killers. At my question, from a religious person, to her, a non believer: is there a point, beyond psychosis, in which you face pure evil, she instantly replied: certainly.
We have experienced almost total failure in contending with hideous crime, and pure evil, by those professions whose primary job is to protect the innocent: lawyers, psychiatrists, and religious leaders. The commonality is a total avoidance of carrying the crushing consequences of their decisions. Personal responsibility for personality destroying decisions never, or rarely occurs. Pure evil is never stopped; it is allowed to prey on innocents. Our society holds that evil does not exist, that people are misunderstood, that they can not be held responsible for their actions, and that individuals have very strict, limited rights to protect themselves against lethal threats.
I have no great knowledge of the massacres at Tuscon, VA Tech., Fort Hood or the planes on 9-11, but I am certain if someone nearby was packing heat, the number of dead and wounded would be much smaller and include the killers. I, a gun owner, would vote for a legal rebuttable standard, lower than a felony, or insanity, which would prohibit the ownership of weapons. I, a conservative, would divert government funding from obscene pork, to support out patient mental health centers which have parole powers, e.g come in and get your meds or we will arrest you, and put you in the big house. And I would execute killers, who have any concept that they were taking human life. If we have spent a trillion dollars trying to kill Ben Laden, for his 9-11 attack, it is reasonable to stop those within our society, whose behavior is identical.
Mental illness is poorly understood, the lean must go to the innocent, and our professions must do their job.
If a person in the midst of a criminal act ends up shooting some bystanders, we understand what happened, give the captured criminal a trial and a resulting sentence. However we also have a law that says if the criminal is judged insane by a couple of psychiatrists then his sentence is changed to providing him mental care, and if he gets better he may be released back into the community, even if the person shot was the President of the United States.
Now we have many respondents to this blog proposing to allow these same psychiatrists to put people away before they do something bad, believing that psychiatrists can look into someone’s mind and determine his fitness for freedom. That is also the basis of hate crimes since hate is a thought, if a learned judge looks into a persons mind and determines that he thought hate, then that person can be penalized.
Do all those who are proposing to go out and find people with a potential to be not sane and have them put away under psychiatric care, also believe in thought crime, and in putting away potential thought criminals before they can act criminally? Stalin’s grave is rumbling at his patent infringement.
If a person in the midst of a criminal act ends up shooting some bystanders, we understand what happened, give the captured criminal a trial and a resulting sentence. However we also have a law that says if the criminal is judged insane by a couple of psychiatrists then his sentence is changed to providing him mental care, and if he gets better he may be released back into the community, even if the person shot was the President of the United States.
Now we have many respondents to this blog proposing to allow these same psychiatrists to put people away before they do something bad, believing that psychiatrists can look into someone’s mind and determine his fitness for freedom. That is also the basis of hate crimes since hate is a thought, if a learned judge looks into a persons mind and determines that he thought hate, then that person can be penalized.
Do all those who are proposing to go out and find people with a potential to be not sane and have them put away under psychiatric care, also believe in thought crime, and in putting away potential thought criminals before they can act criminally? Stalin’s grave is rumbling at his patent infringement.
The mentally ill were de-institutionalized as a result of the the liberal do-gooders, who do not take credit for their work.
This is not quite correct. There were a lot of good intentioned efforts, some by liberals, some by libertarians, some by conservatives. The intentions were generally good (sometimes a bit zealous). The results were not.
You’re obviously no flaming libertarian yourself. Meanwhile, the “do-gooder” around here is Clayton Cramer.
Your comment, of course, was otherwise brilliant.
Duh.
Mental illness is a “pass” given to criminals by a liberal Jurisprudence with an ax to grind against a faith-based capitalist social system. It’s the pill administered by liberal Courts to society, in response to the radical Bill Ayers doctrine of an “inherently unjust” racist social system.
Mental illness is the least effort route to a total lack of personal responsibility, shown to criminals by liberal Judges who adhere to an ellusive and dilusional quest for the utopian Rawlsian “social justice.”
So your position is that there is no such thing as mental illness, just sin?
To the extent that criminal intent and/or criminal action are/is involved, absolutely.
Paul,
Let me assure you that time in a mental hospital is far less pleasant than time spent incarcerated in an ordinary facility. The family member I referenced in my earlier post spent time in both. Anyone who pleads insanity to get a supposedly lighter sentence will soon regret it if they are not in need of the atmosphere offered in those facilities.
For several centuries, our legal system has recognized that the mentally ill are not morally responsible. Liberals did not invent this.
Liberalism has been around for “several centuries” alas.
I’ve long been a supporter of both first amendment and second amendment rights, which are both under attack because of this horrific crime. But if I have to choose between attacks on the first and second amendments, and Cramer’s personal version of blaming people who didn’t do it, I’ll gladly jump over to the other side.
A Russian friend tells me that before Glasnost, anyone caught saying something not politically correct was visited by KGB psychiatrists, who deemed them “mentally ill”, and kept in a hospital with enough drugs to prevent them from writing or speaking coherently. Given the way our legal system is going, I would want a least a unanimous jury decision to confirm any involuntary hospitalization. (Of course, the jurors might be afraid of being next.)
Different states had different methods of determining commitment. In some states, they used something like a coroner’s inquest with a six person jury for these decisions.
I have a friend whose son was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic within the last year. My friend and her husband have been extremely frustrated since he turned 21 because they can do nothing when he refuses to takes his meds or his behavior becomes erratic (beyond calling the police). Our current system is geared toward letting the mentally ill person make all the decisions instead of the sane family members. Why do we let someone who is clinically insane decide whether or not he should take the medications that help him live and interact more safely with his family and the world around him? My daughter and one of his sisters are afraid to be around him. When the local university he is struggling to attend had a shooter on campus, my first thought was, “Please do not let it be him”. He is doing better this year but I hope and pray he does not become the perpetrator of yet another tragedy.
Inmypyjamas,
I will keep your friends in my prayers. It can be a very long road to effective treatment.
In our case the city where we lived at that time is a sort of dumping ground for the mentally ill, because there is a reasonably good system in place to care for them. Unfortunately, this meant that as long as we were willing to take him back home after being hospitalized and stabilized, that’s where he would end up.
When my mother had finally had enough and refused to take him back, the doctors looked at her as though she were a worm. I spoke up at that point and said, “As for your reassurances that we will have help and support, we’ve heard them before and when we take him back in, nothing happens. Despite your promises you have provided no help. Since the only way for him to get this help you’ve promised us over and over is for him to be without any place to stay, we’re not taking him back.
We didn’t abandon him, we visited and called him regularly through a series of different placements, doctors and medications. It’s a long road, but he is now stable, has friends and a life where he is useful. We love him and that’s what’s important.
Your friends have some hard decisions ahead and I wish them all the best.
BBC4 aired a programme last night called, appropriately, “Mental”, about the closure of the old-style, grim-looking asylums. Most of the ‘inmates’ were not certifiably mad but “socially inadequate”, people who’d been dumped there because their families, and society as a whole, didn’t want them. Some of the stories of abuse were distressing to put it mildly but some were centres of excellence, at the forefront of medical research.
The system (in Britain) came to an end in 1969 because it was uneconomic to support such large numbers–hundreds of thousands. In the present time of austerity it is unlikely any government will commit to the necessary expenditure to reinstate the system. It was, BTW, the Conservatives, in particular Enoch Powell, who were responsible, for reasons of ‘humanity’.
“Most of the ‘inmates’ were not certifiably mad but “socially inadequate”, people who’d been dumped there because their families, and society as a whole, didn’t want them.”
Interesting. That was not generally the case in the U.S. Even those who claimed that there was a problem generally admitted that most patients were actually mentally ill.
Okay, doesn’t look like there’s a personal story of being a victim of a psychopath here, so I’ll share mine. It was quite a while back – I was waiting at a bus stop on my way to work. Rainy day, so I had an umbrella. There was one other person at the stop, an older black man who was clearly homeless and not dressed for the weather. I was stupid, I guess, and I gave him my umbrella out of pity. Note that we were both in a bus shelter with three plexi walls.
After the umbrella thing, he walked directly in front of me to where he blocked my exit and, with a smile, asked what time it was. Well, I didn’t have a watch on, there was a clock over his shoulder, and I wasn’t about to look down, so I said “Right behind you, it says ***.” His smile disappeared into a nasty – I can’t even describe it today, just a rictus of evilness – and he punched me right in the forehead as hard as he could, then started shouting things at me. I grabbed my briefcase and slipped around him as fast as I could – he followed, using the umbrella – a sharp-tipped full size deal – to punctuate. I backed away so I could watch him and also get away, and started yelling for help. Note: this is the busy downtown area of a major metro. No one stopped, though lots of people looked curiously. Finally, a man across the street – a banker – yelled out “Are you okay?”
Crazy Man stopped short, turned to him and said, “Yeah, everything fine.” I did not hesitate, but booked it across the street, where the banker was holding open the secure door to the bank HQ. He helped me call 911 and my boss, I refused ambulance, and then he said, “I almost didn’t say anything, but then I saw your bag and realized you were one of us.”
(So that’s a whole nother issue. Anyway.)
The guy was gone by the time police arrived. I gave them a description, as did the banker. He had attacked two other women – but not with my umbrella, which he apparently discarded – by the time he was caught. While incarcerated, he also attacked a female corrections officer, and man she was hot about it when I met her later. He gave me Bells Palsy (fortunately, it cleared up) from the injury, so when we went to court, the other three women deferred to me, mostly, as the most grievously injured.
So after the court thing, we all called and called – and then the corrections officer called me to say they were “letting the b****** out.” He had been judged guilty – but insane. They had no grounds to keep him unless someone put out a mental inquest warrant on him. The four of us went down again and once again I took point. The judge’s first question to me: “What is your relationship to this man?”
Uh, the victim? No, he expected a wife or family member or girlfriend or something like that. Not just some random stranger he attacked just like the other three women. In the end, they kept him two weeks, stabilized him, and shipped him home to Detroit, where they’d tracked down some relatives. So — four counts of felony assault, including one against a corrections officer, and he walks with no record after two weeks.
This is not my only brush with the criminally insane, just the only one where I personally was a victim. At the very least, we can institutionalize THESE people, ensure there is a record following them around not just on state level but on a national level as well, and keep them from getting weapons. What if that man had had a gun? I might not be writing this today, but instead be in a hole in the ground remembered only by my family and a few friends. The four children I’ve had since would not exist, and my husband’s life would be quite different.
Barriers placed to institutionalizing the insane have not just made it impossible to commit someone against their will – they’ve made it impossible for rational solutions to real problems to be implemented when someone is violently insane. We can fix that part, at least.
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