If Tucson taught us nothing else (other than everything is Sarah Palin’s fault), it taught us that there aren’t enough resources anymore for the mentally ill and criminally insane.
While it’s dangerous to advocate locking someone up against their will and stripping them of their rights for the “greater good,” sometimes common sense needs to be used. When Jared Loughner first started making threats against an elected official, he should have been arrested and sent for a psych evaluation. Perhaps last week’s tragedy could have been avoided.
There are other cases where mental illness is more obvious, such as in the case of transsexuals. Yes, I know it’s contentious because of all the politically correct lobbying by gay rights groups we’ve been subjected to over the past few decades, but try to remember that it wasn’t so long ago that homosexuality was listed as a mental illness. And anyone who wants to self-harm themselves to the point of mutilating their genitals shouldn’t be considered capable of making the distinction between right and wrong.
Here’s an interesting case out of the UK, about a judge suspending the sentence of a drug dealer because it would be “stressful” for him/her:
A cross-dressing drug dealer has been spared jail after a judge ruled it would ruin his chances of completing a sex change.
Ian Morris, 41, who has changed his christian name to Jean, is due to start hormone treatment next week, having been trapped in a ‘sexual nightmare’ since childhood.
He ended up in court after police intercepted nearly 2kg of the hallucinogenic drug ketamine which was sent to his flat.
But his lawyers pleaded with Judge Mark Horton to spare him a jail term because he is at a crucial stage in becoming a woman and would find it ‘difficult’ in a male prison.
The judge agreed and suspended his 11 month jail term at Bristol Crown Court.
The Judge – who referred to the defendant as ‘Miss Morris’ throughout the proceedings – said: ‘I am in no doubt that you have led something of a nightmare existence as a transsexual for the entirety of your life.
‘The result is you have walked something of a sexual tightrope, leading to an extremely sad and depressing existence.
‘The reality is this is your final chance to change difficult areas of your sexuality.
‘You have received Government funding and if I send you to prison I would be sentencing you to a continuation of your sexual nightmare, possibly forever.’
So here you have a judge and counsel playing along with the charade that this is perfectly ok, when perhaps therapy and treatment is what this person needs, even if it has to be forced upon him by the state.
It brought to mind this old case from Montreal:
May 25 [2007] is the 20 th anniversary of the criminal blaze which razed the 1906-built Church of the Redeemer, which boasted some of the most impressive architecture and stained glass this city will ever know.
The Unitarian church at Sherbrooke and Simpson was torched in a suicide attempt by the church’s organist, transsexual Wilhelmina Tiemersma, 38, who was a suicidal man named William before getting an operation in 1984 and becoming a suicidal Wilhelmina. That was not to be the only organ that she would destroy.
S/he – who had been institutionalized in an insane asylum for a month in 1970 – answered an ad and became the organist of the place until May 25, 1987 when she came in and opened a gas valve and lit music manuscripts from the 1840s with a candle and left to roam the city. S/he confessed to being aware that the church caretaker Ruben Pradier, his wife and two kids would likely die as a result of her actions, although she returned six hours later to warn them to leave.
Firemen Pierre Letourneau, 31 and Jean-Pierre Longpre, 32, both fathers of three young children, died when a wall collapsed on them while they were perched on a ladder dousing the inferno.
S/he was originally charged with second-degree murder but was only sentenced to eight years for criminal negligence causing death. She was sentenced in 1988 and released in 1990. In 1991 she was invited to give an organ concert at Christ Church Cathetdral. She is reportedly still alive, on welfare.
Not related to homosexuality, there was this tragic case here in Toronto a few days ago, where a police officer was killed by a homeless (potentially) schizophrenic man.
Less than two weeks ago, Richard Esber Kachkar was huddled outside a crumbling St. Catharines building, one he bought for $29,500 only to leave vacant for years as he lived on the streets.
This morning, the 44-year-old man is at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, recovering from gunshot wounds suffered during a violent rampage in which a Toronto police officer was killed.
What happened in between remains a mystery. How did a once-married father of two — known around town as a friendly, neatly dressed, aspiring business owner — wind up at a Toronto homeless shelter Tuesday night, mere hours before allegedly stealing a snowplow and killing Sgt. Ryan Russell?
“I think we’re all just a little bit in shock right now about the whole thing,” said a longtime friend of Kachkar’s family, who asked not to be named.
“It just goes to show you, you never really know. People make choices you just never expect.”
People knew this man was messed up. They knew he needed help. Instead, because the right to freeze your balls off on the street trumps the necessity of care, his mental derangement was ignored in favor of expediency.
I saw this myself, living in the shelter system last year. The mentally ill are left to wallow in their disease (and yes, we had a pre-op tranny living in the house, too) while the bureaucrats in charge of their well-being merely shove starchy food down their gullet and ignore any problem beyond a shortness of toilet paper in the upstairs loo. There isn’t even support in the shelter system to help the willing access mental health services, let alone those who don’t realize they have problems.
In Toronto, there’s a heavy emphasis on addiction support and recovery in the mental health system, with less care available for those who have organic mental illness. And again, that addiction support is only for those who are willing to accept it. In either case – addiction or organic illness – a crime has to be committed before anyone can step in. Threatening behavior isn’t enough.
In the last half century, asylums and hospitals for the criminally insane have been all but eliminated, as have resources for those who live beyond the walls of “the bin.” These places were deemed “inhumane”, and were replaced by shelter beds and social workers who spend much of their time filling out forms for other social workers to read. This might work – it has worked – for someone like me. But it won’t work for someone who lives inside an otherworld inside their mind, and sees no reason to ask for help escaping it.
Wow. You are comparing me with a notorious criminal. You consider me not “capable of making the distinction between right and wrong”. Wow. I’m curious if you’ve ever actually talked to a transexual? The few you write about are not exactly a representative sample. Let me clear something up for you – most of us aren’t criminals or drug addicts. Some, like me, are pretty dull actually. I have a good job, I pay my mortgage and my taxes, spend time with my kids, go to church, and volunteer for a variety of charities. I’m pretty sure no one has ever considered me a danger to society. Really, being transexual is just one hell of a birth defect. Wanting to have my birth defect corrected is a pretty sane desire. Unfortunately there are lots of dangerous people out there, but being transexual isn’t a causal factor.
Unless the legislature wants to change the sentence for possessing a few pounds of ketamine to getting raped to death, it would probably be wise to keep ‘Miss Morris’ out of the penal system.
Keeping the mentally ill out of prison is a good idea, too. Prisons aren’t designed to treat the crazy, they just medicate them and release them, usually crazier than before. But my fellow “law and order” types, particularly in the United States, have made the standard of “not guilty by reason of insanity” almost impossible for most defendants to attain. The only problem was that in looking tough, they didn’t think through the consequences very well.
Crazy people famously do unpredictable shit, and that’s not something you need in prison. The insane are a clear and present danger to everyone around them in the clink, especially the guards and support staff. Watch MSNBC on the weekends if you don’t believe me.
Having said that, I look at things like involuntary commitment with a great deal of trepidation for any number of reasons.
First, I don’t trust the government enough to make it easy for them to relieve the citizenry of their rights. Most conservatives are dumb enough to beileve that “the government” consists entirely of politicians and tax collectors, but soldiers, cops and prosecutors are from some sunshiney lollipop NGO or something.
Second, the law is supposed to be a deterrent, not a preventative tool. For the most part, it determines guilt and punishes it. And it usually doesn’t do that very well. For that reason, I’m pretty comfortable with the standards that we have now for reasons that I laid out in my first point.
Third, lots of asylums would be very expensive and there’s almost no political support to “throw money” at people who are seen as criminals in ways that don’t involve newer and bigger jails and prisons.
Fourth, you would need a massively expensive and staggered system of asylums for the mentally ill. Locking Miss Morris in a cell with Jared Loghner almost certanily wouldn’t end well.
All in all though, I kind of like the way you addressed a hyper-complicated issue.
I’m inclined to agree with Jay. in the absence of a crime, who gives a shit about how anyone plays dress-up?
@Skippy, great comment, and you’re right about the staggered system that would be required. But hospitals and prisons in the US are already private – why not the Bin?
@Jay. Jesus. I love that “have you ever met a Muslim/black person/lesbian/whatever” lack of an argument that those in a snit bring to me. I live in one of the largest, most cosmopolitan cities in the world, and what part of I LIVED WITH A PRE-OP TRANNY did you miss from this article? If someone wants to mutilate their body, be it by cutting, anorexia, or cutting off their fucking penis, they need psychological help, not a parade.
RG
If one agrees that incarcerating bad guys is an essential and proper function of government, then those functions shouldn’t be privatized. The experience with private jails in the U.S, particularly with minors, hasn’t been great.
It was only about two years ago that two Pennsylvania judges wound up going to the clink for taking bribes from prison contractors. The potential for corruption is staggering. If prison and asylum contractors aren’t allowed the cost overruns that the defense industry is, the cost cutting would logically impact their “clients”, who still have rights under both domestic and international law.
You can privatize things like garbage collection. But the essential things that government does shouldn’t be, particularly when individual rights and public safety are at issue.
Following your log, you could then have private police and private courts. Why not a private legislature? Sure taxes would be enormous and there wouldn’t be a democracy anymore, but let’s give it a shot!
I’d draw the line at private armies, though. It was tried once. In the Dark Ages, which one supposes were aptly named.
As to your response to Jay, again, I have to side with him. “Cutting, anorexia, or cutting off (one’s own) fucking penis” (which I assume you mean by surgery, as opposed to with a butter knife) are all perfectly legal activities. No legislature has that I’m aware of has criminalized any of them, and I’m not sure how you would police it if they did.
How many pubilc resources would you devote to checking peoples BMI, arms and looking down their drawers, Wendy? Especially if those folks really aren’t bothering anybody. Do you really want to pay for that? Because under involuntary commitment, you would.
Civil commitment is a drastic step that should only be employed in the most drastic circumstances, like deranged parents with guns and kids in the house. And it’s always nice if there’s an underlying crime to point to. Otherwise, you quickly find yourself in a position where people you don’t like are being extrajudicially being removed from society for no other reason than that you don’t like them.
Big problem, no easy solution. In the US, we did empty the mental hospitals so to speak, but most of the people went to private care. They are in the community; but, with supervision. Some have avoided that ‘help’ for many reasons. Some are Nuts, but not too nuts to take away their civil rights for. Others have learned to be crafty enough to stay under the radar. The problem is ‘how do you know who to take off the streets’ without taking out everyone that just happens to be outside the bell curve and still not become a police state. I don’t have the answer either.
Jay – being a homosexual, transexual, bi-sexual or transgendered person means that such individuals are mentally ill. This has all been researched out of sight. In this age of political correctness, where the power to change the norms in society has been handed over to aggressive special interest groups, an incredible amount of social engineering has taken place and continues on unchecked. The truth is no longer acceptable. You say you have children and go to church, yet you dress up in womens clothes? Blimey, just what sort of example is that for your children?
On the subject of homosexuality, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic list of mental disorders in 1973, despite substantial protest from other professional organizations. They did not sit around and discuss this in a measured, scholarly way after reviewing all the facts, they did so because they were continually being contfronted and threatned by militant homosexuals. This pattern has been repeated a million times over as queers scream about their “rights” and how they just want to be “accepted.” But its gone way beyond mere “acceptance.” Never satisfied, the GLBT (“Giblets”, as I call them) parade through our streets in public dispalys of nudity and sado-masochism, trash churches, throw used condoms at catholic priests, drag their criticsd into “human rights” kangaroo courts, “out” celebrities and public figures that they “suspect” of being gay but want to keep it private, demand access to kids classrooms to “educate” (brainwash) them of queer sex, and want marriage laws changed to include same-sex couples, for which there has never ever been any historical, social or moral validity. These are NOT examples of behaviour one would expect from ‘gentle, loving people,” as many queers would have us believe they are.
I quote thus from qualified sources:
J. Michael Bailey included a commentary on the above research; Bailey, it should be noted, conducted many of the much publicized “Born Gay studies” which were used by gay advocates as support for the “born that way” theory. Neil Whitehead, Ph.D.
Bailey said, “These studies contain arguably the best published data on the association between homosexuality and psychopathology, and both converge on the same unhappy conclusion: homosexual people are at substantially higher risk for some forms of emotional problems, including suicidality, major depression, and anxiety disorder, conduct disorder, and nicotine dependence…The strength of the new studies is their degree of control.”
The second study (Fergusson et al. 1999) followed a large New Zealand group from birth to their early twenties. The “birth cohort” method of subject selection is especially reliable and free from most of the biases which bedevil surveys. This study showed a significantly higher occurrence of depression, anxiety disorder, conduct disorder, substance abuse and thoughts about suicide, amongst those who were homosexually active.
The third paper was a Netherlands study (Sandfort et al. 2001) which again showed a higher level of mental-health problems among homosexuals, but remarkably, subjects with HIV infection was not any more likely than those without HIV infection to suffer from mental health problems. People who are HIV-positive should at least be expected to be anxious or depressed!
Even in the Netherlands, where alternative lifestyles are more widely accepted than in most other countries, there was a high level of depression and suicide among gays and lesbians than in any other identifiable group.
The commentaries on those studies brought up three interesting issues.
1. First, there is now clear evidence that mental health problems are indeed associated with homosexuality. This supports those who opposed the APA actions in 1973. However, the present papers do not answer the question; is homosexuality itself pathological?
2. The papers do show that since only a minority of a nonclinical sample of homosexuals has any diagnosable mental problems (at least by present diagnostic criteria), then most homosexuals are not mentally ill.
In New Zealand, for example, lesbians are about twice as likely to have sought help for mental problems as heterosexual women, but only about 35% of them over their lifespan did so, and never more than 50% (Anon 1995, Saphira and Glover, 2000, Welch et al. 2000) This corresponds with similar findings from the U.S.
Next, we ask–do the papers show that it is gay lifestyle factors, or society’s stigmatization, that are the motivators that lead a person to attempt suicide? Neither conclusion is inevitable. Still, Saghir and Robins (1978) examined reasons for suicide attempts among homosexuals and found that if the reasons for the attempt were connected with homosexuality, about 2/3 were due to breakups of relationships –not outside pressures from society.
Similarly, Bell and Weinberg (1981) also found the major reason for suicide attempts was the breakup of relationships. In second place, they said, was the inability to accept oneself. Since homosexuals have greater numbers of partners and breakups, compared with heterosexuals, and since longterm gay male relationships are rarely monagamous, it is hardly surprising if suicide attempts are proportionally greater. The median number of partners for homosexuals is four times higher than for heterosexuals (Whitehead and Whitehead 1999, calculated from Laumann et al 1994).
A good general rule of thumb is that suicide attempts are about three times higher for homosexuals. Could there be a connection between those two percentages?
Another factor in suicide attempts would be the compulsive or addictive elements in homosexuality (Pincu, 1989 ) which could lead to feelings of depression when the lifestyle is out of control (Seligman 1975). There are some, (estimates vary, but perhaps as many as 50% of young men today), who do not take consistent precautions against HIV (Valleroy et al., 2001) and who have considerable problems with sexual addiction and substance abuse addiction, and this of course would feed into suicide attempts.
The promiscuous person–either heterosexual or homosexual –may in fact be more likely to be antisocial. It is worth noting here the comment of Rotello (1997), who is himself openly gay: “…the outlaw aspect of gay sexual culture, its transgressiveness, is seen by many men as one of its greatest attributes.”
Ellis et al. (1995) examined patients at an clinic which focused on genital and urological problems such as STD’s; he found 38% of the homosexual men seeking such services had antisocial personality disorder, as well as 28% of heterosexual men. Both levels were enormously higher than the 2% rate of antisocial personality disorder for the general population (which in turn, compares to the 50% rate for prison inmates) (Matthews 1997).
Perhaps the finding of a higher level of conduct disorder in the New Zealand study foreshadowed this finding of antisocial personality . Therapists, of course, are not very likely to see a large number of individuals who are antisocial because they are probably less likely to seek help.
Secondly, it was previously noted that 43% of a bulimic sample of men were homosexual or bisexual (Carlat et al. 1997), a rate about 15 times higher than the rate in the population in general–meaning homosexual men are probably disproportionately liable to this mental condition. This may be due to the very strong preoccupation with appearance and physique frequently found among male homosexuals.
In short, the GLBT “lifestyle” is not a valid lifestyle at all, but a deathstyle – a lie. Such individuals need to face the plain truth that they need psychiatric help, not more and more laws to “protect’ thjem and their lifestyle from “homophobes” (i.e., normal people).
When we stop talking about the evils of a “homophobic society” and start facing the reality of an abnormal minority group heterophobes, then perhaps we are getting closer to the truth.
Don’t forget that the general institutionalization of the “mentally ill” can be a two-edged sword. The political Left already recognizes outspoken opposition to such things as radical Islam and the radical Gay agenda as psychiatric “phobias”. The day may come soon when this sort of dissent is officially recognized as a mental disorder by the medical community as well, a la Soviet-style pseudo-psychiatry.
The problem with psychiatry is it is not a true medical science — you can’t take “mental illness” and put it under a microscope like other diseases and watch its organic behaviour to produce a cure. It simply does not have fundamental bio-physical properties. Hence, it is the easiest “disease” to misdiagnose or abuse for political/ideological/subjective purposes.
No mental health professional can objectively measure 25 cc’s of thinking, or 50 millilitres of thought, or 100 grams of belief. Mental health is mostly guesswork, combined with wisdom and common sense, with a little bit of medicine (i.e. pharmaceuticals) mixed in. Add to that the highly interpretive “science” of behaviour analysis, cultural and ideological differences, and you’ve got a veritable witch’s brew for really bad medicine if it becomes the exclusive domain of politicos.