[humanser] Now What

[JD TOWNSEND]

Wonderful to have a conservative Republican writer acknowledge the need for mental health care.  Isn't it about time?




JD Townsend, LCSW
Daytona Beach, Florida, Earth, Sol System
Helping the light dependent to see. 

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Mary Ann Robinson 
  To: Human Services Mailing List 
  Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2011 6:05 PM
  Subject: [humanser] Now What


  I got this from another list and hope list members find it interesting.

  Mary Ann Robinson

  Now What?
    Mona Charen
    Some good has come of the tragedy in Tucson.  President Obama
  has issued a de facto rebuke to those in his camp who attempted
  to use the murders to discredit and smear their political
  opponents.  It was no more than decency for the president to rise
  above that extremely low threshold -- but rise he did and for
  that he deserves credit.
    But a call to high-mindedness such as the president issued is,
  in the nature of things, not likely to be effective for very
  long.  If any lasting good is to be achieved out of this horrible
  episode, it will require addressing the question that Obama
  mentioned only glancingly, but that really is the heart of the
  matter -- mental illness.
    Dr.  E.  Fuller Torrey, writing with a rare combination of
  compassion for the mentally ill and concern for the general
  public, has analyzed the failure of our system for dealing with
  mental illness in "The Insanity Offense: How America's Failure to
  Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens." Anyone
  who is serious about preventing the next Tucson massacre should
  read this book.
    In 1955, when the U.S.  population stood at 164 million,
  558,000 people were living in mental institutions.  Over the
  course of the next 30 years, nearly all would be released as
  deinstitutionalization swept the nation.  The mental hospitals
  were closed, leaving former residents to make do on the streets
  and (increasingly) in the prisons.  Today, roughly 4 million
  Americans suffer from serious mental illnesses and about 1
  percent of them, 40,000 individuals, are violent.
    Deinstitutionalization began not as a money-saving measure
  (though it doubtless appealed to some for that reason) but as an
  idea.  Psychiatrists like Thomas Szasz ("The Myth of Mental
  Illness") and sociologists like Erving Goffman ("Asylums") argued
  that symptoms of mental illness like raving, hearing voices, and
  paranoia were actually responses to being institutionalized.
  Asylums, claimed lawyer Bruce Ennis, were places "where sick
  people get sicker and sane people go mad." Szasz even denied that
  mental illness was real, preferring to see inmates as
  nonconformists.
    Such were the '60's.  At this moment of reduced partisanship --
  if we really are in such a moment -- perhaps Democrats and
  Republicans can summon the humility to recognize that this
  disaster was a bipartisan one.  Politicians of both parties
  agreed that subjecting people to psychiatric treatment against
  their will was immoral and un-American.  And so a flood of deeply
  impaired human beings was loosed on American society.  Numerous
  studies have found that about one-third of homeless men and
  two-thirds of homeless women have serious mental illnesses.
  Among the "hardcore homeless" or "permanent street dwellers,"
  close to 100 percent are mentally ill.
    On the streets, the homeless have been granted the freedom to
  be assaulted, to "sleep under bridges," as Anatole France once
  mocked in another context, to freeze to death, to be robbed and
  raped, to be lit on fire, and killed.  They rummage through trash
  bins for food and park their filthy shopping carts under
  highways.
    Autonomy and individual liberty are cherished ideals --
  achievements of Western civilization.  But there can be no true
  autonomy for those with unsound minds.  To insist upon the right
  of the mentally ill to refuse treatment is cruelty masquerading
  as respect.
    Most mentally ill people are not violent, but among the
  mentally impaired we do find 40,000 or so deeply disturbed and
  dangerous psychotics -- out of whose ranks we have gotten the
  mass killers of the past 50 years -- from Son of Sam to Seung-Hui
  Cho (Virginia Tech) and sadly, too many more to list.
    A study of "rampage killers in the United States reported a 46
  percent increase in such tragedies in 1990-97 compared with
  1976-89." Most of those who suffer violence at the hands of the
  dangerously psychotic are not strangers but family members of the
  ill.  Tragically, those family members have often pleaded for
  help only to be told that nothing could be done until the ill
  person committed violence -- by which time, of course, it was
  often too late.
    Workable alternatives are available.  Torrey recommends a
  national database that would track the most problematic patients,
  alerting emergency-room physicians and gun sellers.  Programs to
  force compliance with treatment by withholding SSI payments, for
  example, or on pain of imprisonment, have been effective.
  Torrey's book overflows with common sense reforms.
    The best that we could do to honor the memories of Christina
  Taylor Green and the other Tucson victims would be to address our
  shameful and disastrous mental health policies.
    Mona Charen is a syndicated columnist, political analyst and
  author of Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help.



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