Skip to main content

Issues raised by Newtown, pt 1 - Mental Illness


This is the first in a 3 part series on the child murders in Newtown, CT.  This first installment is about the biggest issue raised, in my opinion: Our country's mental health policies.  The second will be about another hot-button issue: Gun control.  The final one will be on the need for us to better handle the cultural shifts we are experiencing.

I am going to try a new tactic and keep the blogs shorter. I can discuss sources and nuances in the comments, and shortness will hopefully widen the potential audience.

Mental Illness
Most of us seem to think that only "crazy" people would go to a public place and murder as many strangers as possible.  True enough, but while "craziness" may be necessary, it is not sufficient -- it does not cause the incidents, but instead it permits them by removing one of the barriers (individual sanity) to such mass, "senseless" violence happening.

To state what should be overly obvious, most people suffering from mental illness are not going to commit homicide   By most, I mean something like 99.9999%.  This is similar to how many Muslims will be jihadists, or Christians will be KKK members. Some sorts of serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, when left untreated, and especially when combined with substance abuse, DO increase the chances that someone will commit a violent crime.  That should be unsurprising to everyone, but the complete nuance should be remembered when making any sort of statement about mental illness and violence.

This incident can be anecdotal evidence that our system of helping the mentally ill is broken.  It is not slam-dunk evidence, of course -- no system in a free society will ever be able to 100% prevent people from making bad choices.  But the violent deaths of innocent children gives most people pause, and it is certainly worth using that pause to consider the state of our mental health care policies.

For those of us that have worked in institutions that handle mental health patients, we know that the "danger to self or others" standard dramatically changed the landscape with how mental illness is addressed.  In many ways, that is good -- we are not locking up people who believe that Julius Cesar speaks to them daily.  On the other hand, it is also bad, as many of those that would formerly have been committed are now without any meaningful care at all.  This is horrible news for the mentally ill, as their illnesses put them at greater risk of all sorts of bad things (suicide, homelessness, joblessness, and poverty, to name a few).  It is also bad news for society, as we lose their productivity and happiness, and many of us think we should be judged on how we treat the downtrodden... oh, and remember that the untreated ill are the ones that are more likely to be violent.

We will run headlong into problems of freedom and paternalism here, and those problems should be taken seriously.  All serious philosophers on freedom and liberty that I know of, though, base their assumptions on some level of capacity.  You don't expect a 1-year-old to understand these things, nor someone with severe brain damage.  We have to make some sort of definition and determination of capacity so we can help mentally ill people while helping rebuild the individual barriers to these horrific events.

I think we need much more comprehensive assessments and follow-ups, and I think we should be more willing to make mental health treatment compulsory.  Hand in hand with this effort should be an attempt to educate more people on why people that are mentally ill really are ill and the diagnosis does not reflect poorly on them -- that label isn't a value judgment any more than being born with a heart defect reflects poorly on the child.  These are conditions for which there should be no shame, more compassion, and much more societal focus.

For those interested in details about mental illnesses and policies around them, you may find this site worthwhile: http://mentalillnesspolicy.org/index.html .

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to read the Bill of Rights

The legal rights in the Bill of Rights didn't exist until the 20th century Social media has been abuzz with the Bill of Rights, and in particular the 1st Amendment, recently. Many posts, explicitly or implicitly, trace the Bill of Rights to the Founders.  That's wrong and leads to a poor understanding. A proper reading of the Constitution and the law reveals that, while the text was written then, these rights did not apply even on paper to the states until 1868, in fact until the middle of the 20th century, or even into the 21st century for the 2nd Amendment. “It is a Constitution we are expounding.” The Constitution sets out principles and goals, structures and limitations, and we must never forget that . It is law -- the highest law of the land , in fact -- but it is not code , which is detailed and often attempts to be exhaustively complete and explicit. The Constitution was written to provide a framework of balances by a group of  flawed aristocrats trying to rebel from an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Election 2016: Why Hillary’s conflated scandals are unconvincing #ImWithHer

This is part of a series of posts on Election 2016 . To be honest, I’ve stopped listening to most of the scandals about Hillary. That’s not because I think she is perfect or would never do something scandalous, but because the noise of obvious crap, generated over 3 decades, has made me jaded about spending any time investigating stories by people who think Killary is a fascist Communist. To be clear, I think she is an imperfect human. We don’t subject most politicians to the kind of scrutiny that Hillary has faced – how much do we know about George and Laura’s relationship, or his struggles with addiction, for instance?  But she isn’t perfect.  I think she is a bit paranoid and has a tendency to “circle the wagons” at the slightest sign of problems, and I think she is a fierce competitor that swings first and asks questions later. Like all successful politicians, she is willing to spin the truth to meet her needs, and she comes across, in crowd settings, as a bit fak...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why COVID-19 is MUCH worse than the seasonal flu

This is the second in a series of posts about the COVID-19 pandemic . This installment is discussing why COVID-19 is much, much worse than the seasonal flu. Here it is, in a nutshell : COVID-19 is more contagious, more deadly, already has more known long-term impacts, has no vaccine or truly effective treatments, and has no apparent seasonality. Contagion SARS-COV-2 is much more contagious. The median R0 (average number of people infected by each person when nobody is immune) is 5.7 , or more optimistically 2.5 . For the pandemic to go away, R0 would need to effectively be less than 1.  The estimate of the 1918 novel flu was between 1.2 and 2.4 .  (An R0 of 5.7 means we need over 80% of the population to be immune to reach effective herd immunity .) Beyond that, the incubation period is long, and the number of transmissions before symptoms begin hovers near half those infected . And the duration of being contagious is longer, up to 10 days after the first symptoms. That means ...
3 comments
Read more