Guns Were Not The Issue

It turns out guns were not the issue to look at regarding the Virginia Tech shootings.

It was mental illness, acute mental illness.

You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to know that the package broadcast by NBC yesterday was from a paranoid schizophrenic, or whatever we might call it in the DMS these days.

One of the most moving comments on this came from a conservative blogger I seldom agree with, Jerry Fuhrman, who writes as From On High.

Back when we made effective use of our many insane asylums, this animal would never have been allowed to walk the streets.

Amen.

But if we’re to do that, if we’re to lock up people like Cho Seung-Hui, it’s going to cost money. A lot of money.

We need to identify them. We need to treat them. We need to monitor them.

Before we can do this, before we can force everyone in society
(which includes you, Mr. Fuhrman, as well as me) to evaluation, and
possible confinement, we first need to accept what we’re talking about.

Illness.

Our attitude toward those with mental illness, whether diminished
capacity or disease, has been getting worse-and-worse ever since
Geraldo Rivera made his bones in 1971 with his Willowbrook
reports. Willowbrook was a "school" for the "mentally retarded," in
other words a facility for kids with diminished mental capacity. It was
a house of horrors.

The response was to "de-institutionalize" people with mental
illnesses, to essentially throw them into society, and to push drugs on
those we could identify, those who would submit to treatment.

Most in society, like Mr. Fuhrman, came to view those with mental
illness as being bad people. They took a moral tone in thinking and
dealing with them. The year after Rivera made his report, in 1972, Sen. Thomas Eagleton was
disqualified for high office when it was revealed he’d had a mental
illness, and was treated with electroshock. (Eagleton died this year.)

We continue to treat mental illness in this way, either
moralistically or with a pill. We are unwilling, as a society, to treat
mental illness as illness, just as we treat heart disease as an
illness. And we tend to classify anything "unusual" in our mental or
emotional makeup as being wholly bad. ADD, for instance, which I have, and which my kids have, is considered a Disorder, kids who deal
with it considered to need "special education," a catch-all which
ignores how so many, like Cho, are actually quite brilliant.

The problem here is our attitude toward those with mental
conditions, and the low priority we give to dealing properly with these
people. We treat it as a moral failing, which causes sufferers to
refuse treatment. We treat it as cheaply as possible, in as limited a
way as possible, because we care more for our money than we do for our
neighbors.

So this is the result. It happens again-and-again-and-again, not
just in schools but in offices and (worse) in our homes. People die
because we’re in denial about the nature of mental illness. It’s an
illness that can and must be dealt with. It’s not a moral failing.

Let me go back to Mr. Fuhrman’s quote.  "Back when we made effective
use of our many insane asylums, this animal would never have been
allowed to walk the streets." Willowbrook is his answer. Cage the
animals. They’re bad, they’re not human, get them away.

But they are human. With proper diagnosis and treatment, most of those with mental illness can function and contribute to society. Cho
Seung-Hui was as much a victim as any of the people he murdered. His
murders were an extroverted suicide. And they were highly preventable.

But they will never be prevented so long as attitudes like those of Mr. Fuhrman dominate our thinking on this.