Posted on 08/14/2007 7:07:09 AM PDT by SkyPilot
The main reason these people commit violent acts is that they were crazy to start with. The reason so many commit violent acts shortly after starting on a new medication is that evidence of increasingly disturbed behavior was what prompted the initiation or change of medication.
While I think that cultural trends have a lot to do with the prevalence of mild mental illness, I think the only connection between cultural trends and the apparent increasing prevalence of severe mental illness with violence is that we no longer forcibly prevent obviously disturbed people from committing crimes. Fifty years ago, the vast majority of the people we now read about committing horrific crimes while clearly very mentally ill would have been permanently locked up in secure mental institutions long before they had a chance to carry out these acts. Now, political correctness dictates that these people be allowed to remain in charge of their own day to day lives. They are sent to doctors who give them a prescription and send them home. They go home and have babies, in many cases passing on a genetically based mental defect to the children and multiplying the scale of the problem, and in all cases providing readily accessible and defenseless victims.
Take Andrea Yates. a woman who had shown severely disturbed behavior for years, to the extent of carving the numbers 666 into her scalp, and opining that it would be better for her children to die while they were still young and innocent and would go to heaven, because she was a bad mother and if they continued living with her they would become bad and have to go to hell. Do you really think that in the 1950s someone like this would have been allowed to live outside an institution and have unsupervised responsibility for 5 young children? And the family being very religious sure didn’t help that situation.
Then there are the boys who perpetrated the massacre at Columbine. Fifty years ago, their dress and behavior in the months leading up to the crime would have gotten them locked up in a secure “reform school”. Now they’re allowed to continue “expressing themselves”, given some pills, and sent off to a normal high school every day. Did the pills cause the massacre? Did failure to take the boys to church every Sunday cause the massacre? No, the massacre was caused by the stubborn refusal of courts, school officials, and parents to lock up two boys who obviously needed to be locked up for their own and everybody else’s good.
The mix of seriously mentally ill people and religion is often disastrous. Many schizophrenics are attracted to religious ideas, and then elaborate on teachings from outside sources by adding information the imaginary voices are giving them. They often have supreme confidence in what they’re doing, because they’re sure they’re following orders from God. Steering seriously mentally ill people away from doctors and pharmaceuticals, and towards religious institutions as an alternative, is likely to get equally bad results. Mentally healthy people and mildly mentally ill people find ways to make religion use it as a positive force in their lives. Severely mentally ill people don’t, for the same reasons they don’t make good use of all the other positive things the world has to offer.
I noticed your pun. I hear the commercial on TV all the time for the drugs and they always say that possible side effect is Compulsive gambling...and I laugh. Lord... Restless Leg syndrome problem and losing the shirt off your back too due to gambling.
Well, it saved my mom’s life. She was totally doing crazy things, including going down a zip line and falling off and severely breaking her ankle, tearing down parts of her house to “redecorate”, disappearing for hours, spending money like your wouldn’t believe, cussing like a sailor (my mom who want watch shows with cuss words), calling friends and family all night long, etc.
We were worried she would end up dead.
The side effects are better than her being dead.
Great post, SkyPilot. Thanks!
Interesting. Also, “At times my siser has had scary hallucinations,” I really have to wonder how much like a waking dream, nightmare (daymare?), that is. Can you ask her, does she dream at night that she can remember, and further, are the dreams like the hallucinations, or do each (the dreams and the hallucinations) have qualities that make them distinct from one another and she can tell the difference?
“Fifty years ago, the vast majority of the people we now read about committing horrific crimes while clearly very mentally ill would have been permanently locked up in secure mental institutions long before they had a chance to carry out these acts.”
Absolutely. This is why my grandfather spent 40 years in the state mental hospital. He was a paranoid schizophrenic acting in “self defense” against his hallucinations. His illness made him a dangerous man.
My dad told me the story of the night Grandpa was finally overcome with his paranoid hallucinations in 1933. Grandpa grabbed a shot gun and shells, went and hid in a cave behind the family home. He kept yelling to my grandma “Lupe, come with me!!! They’re trying to get us!” (My Dad never found out who “they” was). Grandpa started shooting from the cave. My Grandma Guadalupe grabbed my 8 year old dad and his two baby sisters and ran. Eventually Grandpa surrendered to the sheriff. He was taken to the state mental hospital where he lived out the rest of his life.
I’ve never thought of asking her that question!!! Next time I see her I’ll try to ask her about that.
She does continue to have hallucinations. However, (with medication) she’s able to better tune them out and function in real life.
“A Beautiful Mind” did an excellent job of showing what it it’s like to succumb to schizophrenia, and how medication can help (but not necessaruily cure) the disease.
My FIL is schizophrenic. Without his medications he hears voices and will sit in the corner and actively converse with them. He will also grow extremely paranoid and irrational. When he is on his medication he appears more or less normal, but is very lethargic and not terribly intellectually acute.
Given the choices, I know that he and his family prefer the latter.
That's what used to be called fascism.
So many people all over the world are mentally ill because “leftist politics” and all of the “political correctness” that still exists in the world keeps getting much worse everyday. Liberalism (although they now prefer to be called “Progressives”) is still a dangerous mental disorder!
Did you bother to read the article in question?
By the way, Wilson Van Dusen's originial essay is available online [PDF FORMAT].
originial = original
This is the kind of behavior that would indicate to me an organic cause. I assume that this is what's called "disorganized schizophrenia." Do you think that this kind of schizophrenia should be lumped in with the kind that manifests itself with hearing voices, etc.?
The medical model of which is used today treats mainly the symptoms of the illness, and less so the cause.Ever had a cold? What u get is meds that fix your runny nose, coughing, etc.
I understand that, and that was my point. The root cause of schizophrenia seems to me to remain a mystery.
BTW, got any extras?
You can see the connection where she’s feeding power back into the grid. I like that.
KEYWORDS: disorders; marines; mentalillness; psychiatry; religion
Whoever did that is really freaking cute...
My bi-polar mom is alive, well, and active in her church thanks to meds.
Meds are not for everyone, and I think they are over-prescribed. However, they are a life saver for others.
My pregnancies brought on my hypothyroidism which can cause depression.
I had one doctor prescibe me anti-depressants which I did take. I stopped taking them because I felt numb.
I then went to another doctor for a routine check-up, and she ran a thyroid test on me. I felt much better after getting the thyroid medication.
It is a most thought provoking article, very much in the manner of many of the WND articles previously published.
Having said that, with all due respect, I must call Bravo Sierra on the forgiveness part of the article.
Prior to Jesus and the easy forgiveness policy Jesus instituted, forgiveness required three things:
1. Restitution.
2. A public apology to the wronged by the offender.
3. The apology had to be sincere.
Allowing the above to be bypassed removes personal responsibility for one’s sins. For example, the widows and orphans one stole from do not any longer have to “be made whole again”.
IMHO, not good.
The various groups benefitting from drugging and absolving of responsibility are essentially Liberals in that they allow sins without acceptance and restitution.
Sin and one really does have the original three responsibilities. Allegedly, the Creator said so.
Be that as it may, the societal impacts of departing from the burdens of being an adult human, responsible for one’s actions, have been many and negative.
Negative, unless one is one of the ‘Liberalism enablers’ literally cashing in on one form of Liberalism or another - in which case Liberalism pays.
Personally, I prefer my Commandments and my Constitution as written. The Commandments need no “interpretation” and observing them CAN occur in an undrugged state.
Don’t know anything about this kid, but my dad never locked up his guns. He was hardly insane.
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