The Severely Mental Ill and Asylums
Just some general comments first: When writing about many subjects, and certainly about mental illness, it is difficult to keep from generalizing much of the time. After all, this is just a column, and entire books and multi-volume works have been done on some subjects, and still conclusive answers have not been agreed upon. I try to use words like "some," "many," "often," "tendency," to convey that I'm not trying to paint with a broad brush, and that certainly exceptions exist in whatever it is that I'm writing about. Mental health issues are a "touchy" subject, and correctly so. We all have certain behavior patterns that may seem somewhat strange to certain others. When we get angry, we lash out at one another. Just imagine if every time one of us got angry, that we called the authorities and had the focus of our anger committed to an institution. There wouldn't be any us us left...well, I wouldn't be able to watch all of you. (Just joking!) Anyway, I think you get the drift of what I'm saying.
Just about ten days ago here in Cleveland, a mentally ill man shot and killed a police officer who was responding to a call about a public disturbance. The shooting actually was in Cleveland Heights, an Eastside suburb. The dead officer was only 31. The man who killed him was only 27. As is too often the case, after the fact, it was discovered that the killer had had previous run ins with the law, and in one case dating only from 2005, he had been deemed incompetent by reason of insanity to even go to trial for an attack on another police officer. The lingering question is why he was released from any kind of court enforced monitoring. He was given four years' probation, but even that was reduced to just one year.
In response to the police killing, there was a great column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer entitled "Must Mentally Ill Be On The Streets," which suggested that we need to start reopening some of the closed asylums in the country. I'll bet the advocates for the mentally ill have inundated the columnist's email and regular mail with everything from curses to out-and-out threats. The whole mental health system in this country began to go through an evolutionary change many years ago, with folks I'll call "advocates" saying that mentally ill folks can lead productive lives and live on their own and take care of themselves. Some other folks, I'll call them "tightwads," wanted to reduce government outlays for mental institutions, and the two groups kind of became strange bedfellows. The "advocates" said to the other group, "Hey look, if we have laws that give mentally ill people a chance, they'll become taxpayers. You guys (the "tightwads") can't lose. Mental institutions can have budget cuts, or maybe even be eliminated, AND not only will you save money that way, but the mentally ill will work and pay taxes. So, you'll get more money for your coffers."
We should know better, but after many changes, the whole thing has not worked as we were told that it would. It certainly has not been a total failure, and I do not want to convey that impression, but many folks have fallen through the cracks (and some have even been ON crack) and some of the changes have been so bizarre, that I wonder if some of the "advocates" have more problems than the folks they defend. Mental illness can manifest itself in so many ways and with so many variables, that it is really tough to have a blanket law about such things, but the idea that some folks who have been diagnosed with mental illness can't be required to take and continue to take medication, or to visit a mental health facility on a regular basis, just because "this is a free country," is total NONSENSE. This is not like scraping your knee or cutting your finger. To say that many of these folks can make such decisions for themselves is further NONSENSE.
I go back to my Moody Blues album "A Question of Balance." The problem has been, there hasn't been a hell of a lot of balance on this issue. Some obviously VERY disturbed people have been left to wander our streets, frequently, but not always in big cities. They sleep on the streets, aggressively beg for money and even attack folks just trying to go about their own business. Others may not live on the streets, but have serious problems. (For the politically correct among you, I'm not saying that every person on the streets or who asks for money has severe mental problems.) Having been involved in apartment management for 17 years, I had to deal with some folks who had "problems." Many were not dangerous, in my opinion, and some were, to put it bluntly, a nuisance to others living near them, and to those involved in managing the places, including me. If YOU lived in an apartment building, or even in a private home for that matter, where your neighbor had "arguments" with imaginary people, or accused you of trying to kill or harm them in some way, or if they lived above you and left bathtubs, sinks, or toilets constantly overflow, bringing water down into your living quarters, how do you think you'd feel? I can pretty much guarantee that you'd be complaining, CORRECTLY, to the management, or the authorities.
In the case of apartment buildings, the management doesn't really have many options. For one thing, custodians, maintenance people, secretaries, and property managers aren't usually trained mental health people. Some of these tenants need lots of care and attention. The management can give warning letters about disturbing others in the building, or about letting water run down onto other parts of the property, etc, but in the end, after documenting a number of incidents, the management will have to proceed with evicting the "troubled" tenant. They go to eviction court, where the judge or magistrate sympathizes with the tenant's condition, but then they grant the eviction, and in many cases, the court will try to help the tenant being evicted find new housing, which now simply pushes the problem onto some other apartment building owner and the tenants there. There has to be some better way to handle some of these folks who have more than a little quirkiness. I'm not saying that it should be easy, but having them committed to some asylum is certainly preferable to what has been going on for years now.
http://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-do-we-deal-with-troubled-minds.html
Just about ten days ago here in Cleveland, a mentally ill man shot and killed a police officer who was responding to a call about a public disturbance. The shooting actually was in Cleveland Heights, an Eastside suburb. The dead officer was only 31. The man who killed him was only 27. As is too often the case, after the fact, it was discovered that the killer had had previous run ins with the law, and in one case dating only from 2005, he had been deemed incompetent by reason of insanity to even go to trial for an attack on another police officer. The lingering question is why he was released from any kind of court enforced monitoring. He was given four years' probation, but even that was reduced to just one year.
In response to the police killing, there was a great column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer entitled "Must Mentally Ill Be On The Streets," which suggested that we need to start reopening some of the closed asylums in the country. I'll bet the advocates for the mentally ill have inundated the columnist's email and regular mail with everything from curses to out-and-out threats. The whole mental health system in this country began to go through an evolutionary change many years ago, with folks I'll call "advocates" saying that mentally ill folks can lead productive lives and live on their own and take care of themselves. Some other folks, I'll call them "tightwads," wanted to reduce government outlays for mental institutions, and the two groups kind of became strange bedfellows. The "advocates" said to the other group, "Hey look, if we have laws that give mentally ill people a chance, they'll become taxpayers. You guys (the "tightwads") can't lose. Mental institutions can have budget cuts, or maybe even be eliminated, AND not only will you save money that way, but the mentally ill will work and pay taxes. So, you'll get more money for your coffers."
We should know better, but after many changes, the whole thing has not worked as we were told that it would. It certainly has not been a total failure, and I do not want to convey that impression, but many folks have fallen through the cracks (and some have even been ON crack) and some of the changes have been so bizarre, that I wonder if some of the "advocates" have more problems than the folks they defend. Mental illness can manifest itself in so many ways and with so many variables, that it is really tough to have a blanket law about such things, but the idea that some folks who have been diagnosed with mental illness can't be required to take and continue to take medication, or to visit a mental health facility on a regular basis, just because "this is a free country," is total NONSENSE. This is not like scraping your knee or cutting your finger. To say that many of these folks can make such decisions for themselves is further NONSENSE.
I go back to my Moody Blues album "A Question of Balance." The problem has been, there hasn't been a hell of a lot of balance on this issue. Some obviously VERY disturbed people have been left to wander our streets, frequently, but not always in big cities. They sleep on the streets, aggressively beg for money and even attack folks just trying to go about their own business. Others may not live on the streets, but have serious problems. (For the politically correct among you, I'm not saying that every person on the streets or who asks for money has severe mental problems.) Having been involved in apartment management for 17 years, I had to deal with some folks who had "problems." Many were not dangerous, in my opinion, and some were, to put it bluntly, a nuisance to others living near them, and to those involved in managing the places, including me. If YOU lived in an apartment building, or even in a private home for that matter, where your neighbor had "arguments" with imaginary people, or accused you of trying to kill or harm them in some way, or if they lived above you and left bathtubs, sinks, or toilets constantly overflow, bringing water down into your living quarters, how do you think you'd feel? I can pretty much guarantee that you'd be complaining, CORRECTLY, to the management, or the authorities.
In the case of apartment buildings, the management doesn't really have many options. For one thing, custodians, maintenance people, secretaries, and property managers aren't usually trained mental health people. Some of these tenants need lots of care and attention. The management can give warning letters about disturbing others in the building, or about letting water run down onto other parts of the property, etc, but in the end, after documenting a number of incidents, the management will have to proceed with evicting the "troubled" tenant. They go to eviction court, where the judge or magistrate sympathizes with the tenant's condition, but then they grant the eviction, and in many cases, the court will try to help the tenant being evicted find new housing, which now simply pushes the problem onto some other apartment building owner and the tenants there. There has to be some better way to handle some of these folks who have more than a little quirkiness. I'm not saying that it should be easy, but having them committed to some asylum is certainly preferable to what has been going on for years now.
http://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-do-we-deal-with-troubled-minds.html
Labels: mental illness
posted by Randy at 3:31 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home