It didn’t take long at all for lawmakers, pundits and citizens to start calling for increased gun control and increased crazy control. I’m hopeful it will be a lot of talk and screeching, but in the end, not much will change. That’s the Washington way. Not surprisingly, the gun debate is divided along traditional lines. Those who oppose guns still do, and those who believe in gun rights, well, they’re focusing on crazy control. I’ve never been anti gun. Even when I was at my most liberal (a red diaper doper baby, as Michael Savage would have tagged me), I parted with the party line and supported gun rights (with some controls), along with the death penalty.

But on crazy control, I’ve got very specific views. I don’t believe in forced treatment, period. I’m not against locking someone up if they’ve broken the law or are making threats against someone. (Legitimate threats, not “I wish you were dead,” screamed in the middle of a nasty argument.) But I don’t believe in rounding people up who are non-compliant and holding them down to inject them or force pills down their throats.

Two writers I enjoy a lot have taken very opposite views. Both surprised me - I would have pigeonholed them both in opposite corners. (Another reason NOT to continually try and put people into a box - you’re usually dead wrong.)

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist, and I was astonished to learn, a psychiatrist. If I could sit down and chat with one person in the field, it wouldn’t be Freud, it wouldn’t be Cerletti; it would be this man. I’m crazy (haha) about him. I don’t always agree with him, but he has a way of making his case in a calm, logical manner and I have a hard time imagining anyone sputtering when they read his writings. Oh, I’m sure they do, because there seems to be a large faction of people that are unable to write/speak critically without some form of bizarre ad hominem attack (”Ewww, the stink! Hose it off of me. I read something by Ann Coulter.”) He succinctly sums up the gun debate:

It did not take long for the perennial debate about gun control to break out, preceded by the inevitable scolding and clucking abroad about America’s lax gun laws. It is true that with far stricter gun laws, Cho Seung Hui might have had a harder time getting the weapons and ammunition needed to kill so relentlessly. Nonetheless, we should have no illusions about what laws can do. There are other ways to kill in large numbers, as Timothy McVeigh demonstrated. Determined killers will obtain guns no matter how strict the laws. And stricter controls could also keep guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens using them in self-defense. The psychotic mass murder is rare; the armed household burglary is not.

The psychotic mass murder is rare. Indeed. Yet if you listen to the airwaves or read the opinion pieces, you’d think crazies were roaming the streets with machine guns. Krauthammer is one of very few calling for rational thinking and calm.

If we are going to look for a political issue here, the more relevant is not gun control but psychosis control. We decided a half a century ago that our more eccentric and, indeed, crazy fellow citizens would not be easily locked in asylums. It was a humane decision, but with the inevitable consequence that some who really need quarantine are allowed to roam the streets. In a previous age, such a troubled soul might have found himself at the state mental hospital rather than a state university. But in a trade-off that a decent and tolerant society makes with open eyes, we allow freedom from straitjackets to those on the psychic edge, knowing that such tolerance runs a very rare but very terrible risk.

Bless Krauthammer’s heart. The fact that he’s a psychiatrist not only is a stunner, it brings with it a credibility that the rest of the pundits don’t have. I wish I could hug him. If I thought he liked chocolates, I’d send him a box.

On the flip side, we’ve got Jonathan Kellerman. He’s another writer (novelist) that I enjoy. I’m so disturbed by his point of view that I’d love to screech “I’ll never read another of his books,” but that would only hurt me. I like his books. Oddly, they’re always fairly compassionate. I would have never expected him to sound like E. Fuller Torrey:

I was in graduate school, studying clinical psychology when they began shutting down the asylums. The place was California, the time was the early 1970s, and “they” were an unprecedented confederation of progressives, libertarians and fiscal conservatives. I didn’t challenge what amounted to flimsy anecdotal data, but I did question its relevance to the plight of thousands of severely mentally disabled individuals set loose in vast urban centers.

Notice that he uses the politically-correct term of mentally disabled, but then uses a loaded phrase “set loose.” Crazy people on the loose! Look out, hide your kids!

For though it is true that schizophrenics are responsible for a proportionally lower rate of violent offenses than the general population (because many forms of the disease engender passivity and physical inactivity), when crazy people do act out the results are often horrific: bloody spree killings ignited by paranoid thinking and the angry urgings of internal voices. Which brings us to outrages such as the Virginia Tech massacre. If the Virginia Tech shooter had been locked up for careful observation in a humane mental hospital, the worst-case scenario would’ve been a minor league civil liberties goof: an unpleasant semester break for an odd and hostile young misanthrope who might’ve even have learned to be more polite.

Unbelievable. Would Kellerman say the same about someone held in Gitmo, someone who turned out to simply be an opium farmer from Afghanistan who was in the wrong place at the wrong time? Somehow I doubt he would. I suspect he would be among those screaming from the rooftops that America is a fascist state and look how we’re treating these poor Afghani farmers. A true double standard.

And as someone who HAS been on the receiving end of that worst-case scenario, it’s more than a goof. I don’t know anyone who has been in that situation that could say “Gee, they goofed.” No, many people left psychiatry altogether. (I’m among those who haven’t, although I still obviously have a lot of anger about it.) This won’t be the first time I’ve said this, but I’ll say it again. (And the standard disclaimer: I speak only for myself here.) I’ve been forcibly treated, accidentally put into a schizophrenia study at St. Louis University Medical School (and doped to the max with Haldol) during one of these escapades, and even worse horrors. I’ve also been raped. (nothing to do with psychiatry or hospitals; it was a neighbor who’d been trying to date me for a long time, then got drunk one night and broke in) I’m over the rape. I’ll never be over the humiliation and fear of the trauma inflicted by these “goofs.” If I had to choose one trauma over the other, I’ll take the rape, Alex.

Because in our well-intentioned quest to maximize personal liberty, we’ve moved conceptual eons away from taking the concept of dangerousness seriously.

I don’t have a problem with locking up people who break the law, even people who pose a legitimate threat. But when, in most states, all it takes is the swipe of a pen to keep someone locked up, goofs are a possible result. And as many of us crazy people know, the swipe of the pen can - and is - misused.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 11:32 am and is filed under A Nutter's Prattle, Cookie Cutter Media, Mental Health Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.