Attacks By the Mentally Ill Increasingly Common
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Fuller Torrey explains that in the 1960s federal and state governments began emptying mental institutions; but never put into place outpatient treatment options. Within two decades mental patients began to boost the number of homeless people and many ended up swelling the ranks of the prison population. Inmates who suffer from mental illness include:
- Nearly half of all federal prisoners (45%)
- More than half of state prisoners (58%)
- Nearly two-thirds of local jail (64%).
Ninety percent of people who suffer from schizophrenia will never become violent. But the remaining 10% can be deadly. A study of Indiana estimates that 10% of people murdered are victims of assailants with serious mental illness. That suggests up to 1,600 murders are committed by mentally ill assailants each and every year.
Sounds like an expensive way to treat mental illness.
Bruce, it is expensive, wasteful and irrational.
One could argue that, by definition, most of the people who commit crimes (especially murder) are mentally ill because they deviate from societal norms. Someone who meticulously plans and assaults a crowd of strangers is obviously mentally ill. But should that fact be a valid defense during a criminal trial?
The greatest change has been the virtual elimination of coerced, or nonconsensual, treatment. If there are drug treatment options outside, many patients will not take the drugs because of the side effects or because they don’t recognize their illness (which is the case with about half of schizophrenics).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/asylums/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=grid&utm_source=grid
Here is a good frontline documentary about the subject.
This is the strange underbelly of American society. How do you take care of all of these people?
If “10% of people murdered are victims of assailants with serious mental illness,” does that mean that the other 90% percent were murdered by “normal” folks????
The definition of mentally ill is elastic. Think people in jail might be depressed, bad at impulse control, or have severely disturbed personal relations?
Then they are, by DSM definition, mentally disordered. Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be in jail, that they need “treatment,” or that “treatment” works.
The first jail established in this country was for the rehabilitation of those who were in conflict with the society they environed. While this seems like a good idea it has completely fallen by the wayside. We are creatures of addiction. When the little man gets addicted he ends up perhaps on the street, but, when the big man get addicted he can corrupt and destroy a whole civilization. Jails are big business in this country and we have more in jail according to statistics than any other country in the world. If war defines our way of dealing with one another instead of peaceful debate, I would surmise that the world we live in is afflicted with mental illness. What we see in the world is a reflection of our strengths and weaknesses. Working on ourselves is the only way we can change what we see. Working on others still shows us the same picture. Some one said that when the body is sick we know to look of help, but when the brain is sick we do not recognize our need for help. Those that are not able to to help themselves with out the use of medication or therapy should not be in prison. We need to revamp our idea of mental institutions as they were horribly abusive to the patients in the past. The prisons also need to evolve into institutions that help those with temporary insanity problems caused by an inability to control themselves when buttons are pushed. They could support those who do not have any idea of how to elevate themselves in life to become an important part of the community they live in. We might also find ways of dealing with trauma and be able to delete memories of severe abuse and programming, often irrepairable wounds that cause individuals to be in conflict with their world or even better, teach them how to deal with these traumas asking those who have learned to do so to help. What our jails offer the mentally ill is a bed, clean clothes, food and a roof over their heads. It is also a debilitating experience and then they get booted out and have to get themselves arrested again. They often get beaten by police who are not trained to deal with them and so would rather remain out on the streets hiding. Perhaps we could find a way to offer these people who don’t fit in, at least a place to camp, water, showers and toilets, with one large building for emergencies, a kitchen to prepare food in and self help classes. Those who now get almost free housing could help, and more than likely would be glad to help a few days a month in exchange for the benefits they receive, to oversee and be present in case of emergencies. These people are a product of a dysfunctional society and until we evolve we are responsible for them, and to abuse them just shows how very dysfunctional we are. I wish we could focus on this one problem and deal with it instead of always only dealing with less than half of any one of the many problems we face. Homelessness is an atrocity in our midst. It is a name that has been used for thirty years or so, and to date it has only been reduced by 30% by the efforts of our government. Funding has been cut by over 1/2 even though the number of severely homeless(hardcore, mentally ill) has been climbing, many of whom are war heroes. Those who have fallen into this state and have been able to climb out often with the help of family who care, are having more success than the government, and should head programs for solutions. Those that are temporarily displaced will always find a way to regain what they had, but the mentally ill cannot and always get left by the way. Shame on us as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle stated. We need to stop waiting for the greater government to address this atrocity, and get our local government , counties, cities and towns to address this issue. Camp grounds would be comparatively easy to establish and are not so costly. That is the least we can offer to those in need, including families who cannot afford hotels and pass through.