Mental Illness Or Meanness We live in a world far removed from the one I experienced as a child. We are now even more angry and cynical than we were during the Vietnam War. Criminality is commonplace and its connection with mental illness is a rarity in discussion. Our society calls for final solutions to criminality rather than an evolution to wellness. Contemporary theory appears to be that those who commit crimes need warehousing, not treatment. After all, warehousing is big business.
To be certain, members of our society who commit crimes against us do need a restraint upon their freedom, but this should come as an issue of treatment rather than the idleness and indolence enforced by singular jail cells from which the convicted person is allowed to emerge one hour of 24.
These issues are well-known to me. When I was younger and fresh out of the United States Army, I joined the Harris County Sheriff’s Department. In that law enforcement agency, it was required policy that every deputy spend at least one year working in the jail prior to applying for the “patrol list.” As luck would have it, I was often assigned to the mental health section of the jail.
As draconian as conditions in the 18 or so cells were back then, there was one overriding imperative. You don’t let the prisoner harm himself but we don’t treat him either. In fact, I vividly remember the same prisoner hanging himself on three separate occasions and my cutting him down as many times with a knife I was prohibited to carry in the jail. Without the help provided by the knife, my efforts would have been in vain.
We don’t understand mental illness nearly as well as psychiatrists would have us believe and frankly they have no better solutions than many of us. Even family members are immune to understanding. During the visitation of an uncle with his nephew who had murdered his mother and was found with a woman’s heart in his jacket pocket, the uncle turned to me and said, “He’s not crazy, just mean.”
But while we spend huge sums dedicated to protect the mentally ill from harming themselves or others, we don’t treat them while in custody, spend little on therapy to those who are not in custody… and we spend even less on our veterans. Just this past week, an Air Force airman walked into a Walmart in shot two employees, murdering one. He then committed what many call suicide but I call the angry act of murder. Let’s call it what it is – murder.
This begs the question. Do we really believe murder, drug addiction and a host of other criminal acts is just “meanness” or are they rather the fruits of some psychological deficit?