Posted on 12/16/2012 2:07:20 PM PST by absalom01
For those of us who came of age in the 1970s, one of the most shocking aspects of the last three decades was the rise of mass public shootings: people who went into public places and murdered complete strangers. Such crimes had taken place before, such as the Texas Tower murders by Charles Whitman in 1966,1 but their rarity meant that they were shocking.
Something changed in the 1980s: these senseless mass murders started to happen with increasing frequency. People were shocked when James Huberty killed twenty-one strangers in a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California in 1984, and Patrick Purdy murdered five children in a Stockton, California schoolyard in 1989. Now, these crimes have become background noise, unless they involve an extraordinarily high body count (such as at Virginia Tech) or a prominent victim (such as Rep. Gabrielle Giffords). Why did these crimes go from extraordinarily rare to commonplace? For a while, it was fashionable to blame gun availability for this dramatic increase. But guns did not become more available before or during this change. Instead, federal law and many state laws became more restrictive on purchase and possession of firearms, sometimes in response to such crimes.2 Nor has the nature of the weapons available to Americans changed all that much. In 1965, Popular Science announced that Colt was selling the AR-15, a semiautomatic version of the M-16 for the civilian market.3 The Browning Hi-Power, a 9mm semiautomatic pistol with a thirteen-round magazine, was offered for sale in the United States starting in 1954,4 and advertised for civilians in both the U.S. and Canada at least as early as 1960.5 If gun availability does not explain the increase of mass public murders, what else might? At least half of these mass murderers (as well as many other murderers) have histories of mental illness. Many have already come to the attention of the criminal justice or mental health systems before they become headlines. In the early 1980s, there were about two million chronically mentally ill people in the United States, with 93 percent living outside mental hospitals. The largest diagnosis for the chronically mentally ill is schizophrenia, which afflicts about 1 percent of the population, or about 1.5 percent of adult Americans.6
...
In the 1960s, the United States embarked on an innovative approach to caring for its mentally ill: deinstitutionalization. The intentions were quite humane: move patients from long-term commitment in state mental hospitals into community-based mental health treatment. Contrary to popular perception, California Governor Ronald Reagan’s signing of the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 196712 was only one small part of a broad-based movement, starting in the late 1950s.13
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There is no shortage of these tragedies that have one common element: a person whose exceedingly odd behavior, sometimes combined with minor criminal acts, would likely have led to confinement in a mental hospital in 1960. After deinstitutionalization, these people remained at large until they killed. The criminal justice system then took them out of circulation (if they did not commit suicide), but this was too late for their victims. There is a clear statistical relationship between deinstitutionalization and murder rates. Violent crime rates rose dramatically in the 1960s, most worrisomely in the murder rate.58
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Deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was one of the truly remarkable public policy decisions of the 1960s and 1970s, and yet its full impact is barely recognized by most of the public. Partly this was because the changes did not happen overnight, but took place state-by-state over two decades, with no single national event. While homelessness received enormous public attention in the early 1980s, the news media’s reluctance to acknowledge the role that deinstitutionalization played in this human tragedy meant that the public safety connection was generally invisible to the general public. The solution remains unclear, but recognizing the consequences of deinstitutionalization is the first step.
It is Cloward–Piven strategy
Its the damn drugs people!
Thank you.
Excellent link
Yeah, that drug-control thingy worked out really well, didn't it? /sarc
Somebody locked up in a mental institution who doesn’t kill anybody doesn’t make for a good story. Now, a fun guy receiving electro-shock therapy that fries his brain, that wins oscars. Even if it’s fiction. ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST was fiction....like Peter Pan.
IMO it’s both, with the new drugs also a factor.
I read the entire article and it’s fascinating. It’s hard to conclude our “humane” approach has been good for society OR the mentally ill.
I read a lot about asylums a couple of years ago while doing some research on old and disappearing institutional buildings. There was an entire group devoted to the architecture of asylums designed by a Dr. Kirkbride that stressed open air and spaces ease of access and ability to watch patients. Very beautiful and creepy buildings- Gothic.
Sadly as is often the case- many of the staff and doctors running these places were sick themselves but there were countless that were compassionate and did their best to comfort and help the sickest among us.
I don’t know if our culture has the guts to even consider permanent hospitalization for those beyond help- of the sort the article you linked describes. We will continue to pay the price for not finding a way to deal with them though.
The 80’s is when the children of the generation that rejected the traditional family model grew up. They are what you can expect from feminist mothers and fathers that lack self control and a sense of duty.
Maybe Obama blaming your neighbors for what you don’t have set this guy off. Have we ever had a more divisive person in power outside of the President of Iran in our lifetimes?
Violent videos, Obama’s mouth, a teen getting hyper-sexual due to testosterone hitting in the teens, a stupid now dead mother giving shooting lessons to a mental deficient and you get all this death.
We need to either institutionalize them, castrate them hormonally or lobotomize them.
IMO chemical castration would make them much more docile if you catch them in their early teens.
Maybe Obama blaming your neighbors for what you don’t have set this guy off. Have we ever had a more divisive person in power outside of the President of Iran in our lifetimes?
Violent videos, Obama’s mouth, a teen getting hyper-sexual due to testosterone hitting in the teens, a stupid now dead mother giving shooting lessons to a mental deficient and you get all this death.
We need to either institutionalize them, castrate them hormonally or lobotomize them.
IMO chemical castration would make them much more docile if you catch them in their early teens.
A much older cousin of mine married a mentally ill woman, although he was unaware of this at the time.
Us kids knew something was wrong with her, were even mean about it as only kids can be, but that went right over his head. She was beautiful, from a very good and very prominent family, dressed just so and her manners were impeccable. He was head over heels in love and saw nothing but that.
It turned out that her family knew, that she’d been institutionalized before. Electroconvulsive therapy had kept her from going completely off the rails, but she was absolutely terrified of ever going back to “that place.”. This caused quite the rift between the families, concealing that.
She descended further into whatever mental illness she had, not long after their marriage. He’d had a beautiful brick house built for the two of them, and after they married and moved into it, she seldom left. She let herself go, chain smoking and eating, always eating. She’d stop taking her meds, hiding them, then slip into dementia. It got so bad at times that she’d defecate in the middle of the den rather than get up to go to the toilet.
But, this older cousin of mine, he believed in his marriage vows, despite having been more or less tricked into it. Despite it all, I think he still loved her on some level. This went on for thirty years.
He’d retired and taken to landscaping the yard and remodeling the house he’d built for them as a sort of hobby, a way to pass the days, near enough to keep and eye on her but out of the house since it was not easy to be around her. One day, he had a stroke, fell down in the yard and laid there for two days, with her just looking out the window at him laying there.
He never recovered, dying a few weeks later, at age 65. She has been well cared for, he saw to that. In a secure assisted living facility. She should have been there long ago, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
The only problem with this article is that the author has no idea what he is talking about.
There have been mass murders since the turn of the century.
There have been fewer in the 2000’s than in the 1990’s.
There is another thread on this very subject here on FR.
This sentence should have been crafted a bit better. Maybe it is saying that deinstitutionalization led to homelessness (which is true), maybe it is using the media reaction to homelessness as a contrast to the way the media has dealt with deinstitutionalization. It's hard to tell.
Interesting read.
Interesting read.
The man sounds like a saint. If knowing the Lord was his underlying motivation and strength, he will receive his reward in heaven.
My God! What a tragic and sad story. Poor man. I can’t imagine it was really worth it if you think of what he lost and could have had with another marriage. But even so, I have to say he possessed true nobility and I admire him for his courage and endurance. How awful that her parents did not tell him and tricked him into this life of stress, knowing he was a good-hearted man.
Oh my what a sad tale. Living with mentally ill people is a very tough proposition- some days are so “normal” and then...
I don’t know what the solution is- but we’ve seen both ends of the spectrum and they don’t seem to work. There are nightmare stories of what many “lunatic asylums” were like (Nellie Bly wrote a fascinating one based on using a ruse she made up to be a mental patient) in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Whether or not your cousin did the right thing is hard to say- but HE believed it was right and he lived his code with honor. God bless him.
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