Apr 20 2007
Knee Jerk Reactions Abound
A commentor at Neo-Neocon wrote this:
I’m hopeful universities are going to take a second look at all their potentially psychotic students.
Students should start coming forward and demand that so and so be dealt with immediately. I don’t think presumption of innocence applies in this case, the behavior code must simply be strictly enforced.
Students, faculty and staff should threaten to sue schools with criminal negligence if nothing is done about serious cases. I work at a large university, and I expect to start hearing rumblings from up high any day now. If not, I will start asking questions.
Anyone think I’m way off base here?
Bill O’Reilly said this on his Talking Points:
Public safety trumps privacy. This is not a medical issue. The court makes the designation based on police and medical input.
Second, any institution or work place that accepts a person for employment or education must have access to FBI records. Virginia Tech didn’t tell Cho’s roommates that he was considered dangerous, even though the university knew. Can you believe that?! What if you were the parents of his roommates?
A chill is going down my spine at the way people are reacting to this tragedy. My God. Don’t people know what they are proposing? Last night I heard Bill O’Reilly say that a person who acted out of the ordinary should be sent to a shrink.
People are proposing a tyranny, inviting it in fact. If you step out of the goose-stepping line, you should be subjected to the verdict of psychiatrists for unlimited probings and proddings… just because someone thinks you might do something criminal someday? Shrinks will be the final decision makers on who is acceptable to society and who isn’t? A man’s freedoms and liberties would be yanked away from him on the say-so of a shrink.
How would an eccentric, like Einstein or GK Chesterton, survive in such a world? Simple. He doesn’t.
The commentor from Neo-Neocon refers to a “Behavior code“. Good gracious, man. This is entirely subjective and arbitrary with no objective standard. What behavior code is this gentleman referring? If he means behaving with manners, then, yes, people should behave with manners. But if a person is ill-mannered, is this gentleman suggesting that he should be dragged to a shrink and drugged up? What exactly does he mean by “enforce”?
What is more he said, “I don’t think presumption of innocence applies in this case.” Again, does this man know what he’s saying. He is demanding that a blank check be given to shrinks and other “authorities” to snatch away our right to Due Process, or the notion that you are innocent until proven guilty. Bill O’Reilly and this commentor said yesterday that a person is guilty until proven innocent. In other words, you must prove you are sane and not a threat to society to these shrinks. The burden of proof is on you, not the accuser. If we give into this, we might as well throw our freedoms out the window because they will snatch it away from us with the full weight of law. You might find yourself in a prison (psychiatric ward/ concentration camp) and wonder how we arrived here. Given O’Reilly’s numerous enemies on the Left, he should know better. Should this proposal go into law, he would probably be the first on the firing line. Shrinks are usually Liberal/ Leftists.
This proposal throws habeas corpus right out the window. And you can forget due process. Whatever the reasons one would cite to support this proposal, it boils down to stripping us of our freedom.
I don’t know about ya’ll, but I love my freedom.
Perhaps Mr. O’Reilly, this commentor and legions of other people talking along these lines don’t think that, should this be enshrined into law, it would come back to nail them. They would be sorely, tragically wrong if they think they would be immune to persecution. Maybe one day, these shrinks might decide that Christians are mentally ill. Many people already believe this, including Freud, who called Christianity and religion a mass delusion. What then?
The ONLY state in all of history that gave shrinks that kind of power over everyone was the Nazis giving power to the Gestapo. Their mental wards became concentration camps. People forget that one of the first groups the Nazi’s murdered were the mentally ill. And who decides who’s mentally ill? The Gestapo shrinks; that’s who. The negation of due process and habeas corpus as well as the concentration of power made the Nazi state possible… perhaps even inexorable.
This is not a liberal or conservative thing. I am hearing this from every corner. This tragedy just offends the hell out of the “name-it-and-claim-it” fundamentalist crowd from the right, and the “it’s all good” crowd from the left.
No offense, Neo and other shrinks who might be reading this, but as insightful as shrinks are into human nature, they are also one of the sickest category of human beings out there. One of the highest suicide rates, alcoholism rates, domestic abuse rates, … across the freakin’ board. Just think about the kind of people who would want to become shrinks. More than likely they are trying to cure themselves of their disorders as well as their patients.
If we give this absolute power to the shrink they WILL become the sociapaths.
Let us tread softly here and think— and I mean really think— about what we are proposing. I don’t know the answer to stopping another tragedy like the Virginia Tech Massacre, but this is not it.
Related Posts:
Neo-Neocon: “Like talking to a hole”
Bookworm: Fighting Back
Winds of Change: Failure of Doctrine, not of People
No law is perfect. HIPPA which protects your personal health information is not perfect either. This law works 99.999999% of the time the way it’s supposed to by keeping your private information, well private. In this .000001% case it made it possible for the shooter to legally get guns. What if person A went through hell and spend time in a mental instution and then got out and lead a normal life after that. Should the state know about it so that the university the person is attending knows that person A was suicidal bacause her parents split up due to her dad molesting her? See a problem with that? I sure do. There are legal avenues to have people committed involuntarily if it comes to that. But what these people want is madness, pardon the pun.
Hi Thomas,
I’m the commenter whose reaction/proposal you eloquently criticize.
I was somewhat emotional when I wrote, and looking for dialogue to help process the tragedy. But I was self-aware enough to try to focus the discourse by writing in such black and white terms. I also consciously asked if anyone thought I was way off base. I think only you and a few others were concerned enough to attack my ideas.
I respect that totally. Thanks for writing so eloquently on the dangers of my initial idea.
My own thoughts on this have changed as I’ve reflected and listened to others during the course of the debate. I agree we must have very sober deliberations and only enact the most wise policy changes, if any. I’m becoming much more aware of the protections that must be afforded the wide spectrum of “mentally ill” persons on our Universities. I’m less concerned that there is negligence involved in the VT tragedy, and I’m learning more about the information firewalls that have developed to protect us all from malicious involuntary internment.
On the other hand, I do feel an serious administrative review is required. More resources may need to be offered to students and faculty concerned about students on the spectrum of mental illness, including police resources and training.
Also, I think it is important to recognize as a society that medications allow more and more troubled people to function in our society. Isn’t there a legitimate issue that those mentally stabilized via medications face a responsibility to maintain their stability? I refer to the increasing number of students who are able to enter college with the help of medications who before would not have been stable enough to meet the standards.
My last concern, is that as a public we seem so uninformed about diseases such as paranoid schizophrenia. We don’t know what dangers exist and don’t exist, or when to be concerned. That public awareness can be raised to the benefit of all.
On a lighter note, it is ironic that I’m lumped with O’Reilly and as you note my type of comment is present on both the left and the right. I don’t take it personally, but it turns out I’m the opposite of an O’Reilly fan. I’m probably more left than the next guy, so to speak: active MoveOn member, anti-hillary, Daily Kos/MyDD reader, etc. The only reason I was commenting on a site called Neo-neocon was because I’ve been using the HotAir.com blog updates to follow the tragedy and thus Neo-neocon was the first psych blog I came across. I must admit hotair was among the best covering the story, IMO. And I didn’t find any worthwhile ongoing indepth coverage on the left blogosphere.
I hope we might continue the dialog. I’m of the open-minded type.
This is the natural result of trying to repress aggression and violence, instead of channeling it and using it as the military does. If you prevent people from mutilating, killing, annihilating, and executing evil people who threaten the lives and families of citizens, then the citizens are eventually going to find someone to kill their attackers if they can’t.
This is the same model that is behind the insurgency. If you don’t provide the protection and the local infrastructure, then the Shia or the Sunnis will just find someone else to do it for them, and that someone else might be our mortal enemy. But people say “let the Shias in Iraq alone, they’ll ally with Iran anyways, so why should we shed blood for our enemies”, while somewhere else similar people were saying “America needs more allies and friends to do our dirty wor”.
Somebody’s got to do the dirty work. People wouldn’t have to depend upon the state, if people knew that they could depend upon themselves. America didn’t become as powerful as she is because she relied upon over-specialization. Don’t Americans believe that America is what it is because of the American can do attitude of self-sufficiency and work ethics? This can result in specialization, but specialization is not the source of the strength, self-sufficiency is the source. Money is not stopping people from learning of other trades. Time isn’t, given how much technology we have to save time. Lack of food isn’t, we aren’t starving and required to conserve our calories per day. Resources aren’t the reason, we aren’t lacking in vital fuel or spring steel or munitions. So what is the reason people don’t learn how to survive? Because… they don’t need to? Or maybe it only appears they don’t need to, and that this appearance itself is an illusion that evil makes use of.
As a Shrink I couldn’t agree with you more. Psychiatrists have no special facility for predicting violence (a past history of violence is the single best predictor differentiating between fantasied and real violence) and using Psychiatrists to determine that a person who is out of the mainstream should be deprived of their freedom would be extremely unwise (especially since most Psychiatirsts already think Conservatives are psychologically ill.) I would suggest one correction, however; the Nazis were not the only ones to use their ideosyncratic definition of mental health as a reason to lock up or kill people. The Soviet Union made a specialty out of locking up dissidents as Psychiatrically disturbed; the Chinese have been doing the same thing more recently. It is apparently hard to resist the temptation to label your political opponents mentally ill and lock them up.
Howdy ShrinkWrapped,
After posting this piece, it suddenly occurred to me that the KGB were obsessive about psychology and used it regularly as an excuse to send people off to gulags. China does as well.
Actually, come to think of it, modern secular police states tend to use psychology as an excuse to silence dissidents more than anything else. There is a reason many communists states called concentration camps “re-education camps”. And theocratic dictatorships like Iran, well, do they need an excuse?
I dunno. Thanks for the comment
Alcatholic,
I’m not so sure the dissemination of information about mental illness would prevent this event from happening again. I told me friend once, “A little bit of knowledge of psychology is a dangerous thing,” and I stand by that statement. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people sit around vivisecting each other’s mental processes; it’s like people sitting around a circle jamming red-hot poker sticks at each other. Needless to say, they weren’t psychologists. The only avenue I can think of where an increased awareness of mental illness might be beneficial would be if the police, security guards and other security personnel were instructed.
However, I do quite agree that an intensive administrative review is in order; not so much for the increase in awareness of mental illnesses, but for the purpose of how to deal with such an event should it occur again. Perhaps more security guards are required per square acre of campus ground. Perhaps emergency booths should be more visible and closer together. Colleges and high schools can take actions along these lines.
But if we are looking for comprehensive, preventative measures to take, I think we would find it wanting. We can’t legislate mental health into being, and we shouldn’t incarcerate people without a concrete crime… that is, if we want to keep our liberty.
We keep searching for a one size fits all solution to mental illness and it’s just not there to be had. You wrote that medication allows people to attend college who would otherwise be dysfunctional and maladjusted. However, as I read more about this mad gunman, one of the things that pushed him off the cliff was the system forcing him to take medication and counseling, evinced by his repeated statements that the system is painting him into the corner and that he’s not going to take it laying down.
There are just no easy answers here.
Vegas Art Guy,
Yes, I agree. But this is the discussion America has been conducting for its entire history and especially within the past 6 years, isn’t it? The tango between liberty and order. How much should we have of one to maximize the other?…
Ymarsakar,
I agree that one of the things sorely lacking in America that we used to have in spades is the notion of personal responsibility for our own actions. I blogged on that earlier this week in response to Bookworms’ post.
http://thomaschronicles.com/2007/04/19/response-to-bookworms-post-today/
I think societal ills cannot be cured through legislations and protocols, though in some instances government can mitigate the damages. Perhaps what we need to do is return to our code of honor just in our not-so-distant past…
Here’s a comment I wrote to Laer, before your post, Thom.
Psycho babble and relying upon the “state” or some other heirarchy to protect people, is itself fundamentally flawed. Not only because it never works given the slowness of heirarchies, but because people just aren’t motivated in saving strangers. But you, you are motivated in saving your life, and that motivation equals things getting done. That’s why relying upon individuals to save their own lives and the lives of people the ycare about, is not only efficient, but it is more ethical.
ymarsakar | Homepage | 04.19.07 - 8:38 pm | #
http://cheatseekingmissiles.blogspot.com/2007/04/can-we-learn-what-made-him-go-cho.html
Btw Thomas, Anti-depressants are there to prevent suicides. Which means if you make someone like Cho take anti-depressant “meds”, what you end up is him killing you, instead of him killing himself, first that is.
Thomas,
I’m reading more and more about people arguing against the use of psychiatry to prevent murders like the tragedy at VT.
Dr. Peter Breggin makes an argument against relying on the mental health profession to protect us from the Cho’s of this world. Police intervention is needed, and after debating this issue for a few days, I think I agree. University Police need to be better trained to intervene in cases of aggressive/violent behavior even if mental health issues seems to be an exculpatory cause.
The more I learn about the role and limitations of psychiatrists, the less I’m convinced they could be relied upon to keep the public safe. The police and administrative enforcement of suspension or other punishments for unacceptable behavior seem much more powerful institutions for dealing with campus violence and hopefully preventing mass murder.
And I write this, as you know, as an early believer that the University failed by not understanding and treating Cho’s paranoid schizophrenia. As Cousin Dave wrote above, universities are not mental health treatment facilities. I now believe the best role they can play is to seriously confront and punish aggressive/violent behavior.
I would love to hear what you think about this critique of all the knee jerk reactions like mine.
Dr. Peter Breggin writes:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/the-real-mental-health-l_b_46327.html
The answer to vengeful, violent people is not more mental health screening or more potent mental health interventions. Reliance on the whole range of this system from counseling to involuntary treatment failed. There is not a shred of scientific evidence that locking people up against their will or otherwise “treating” them reduces violence. As we’ll see, quite the opposite is true.
So what was needed? Police intervention. Almost certainly, the police were hampered in taking appropriate actions by being encouraged to view Cho as a potential psychiatric patient rather than as a perpetrator. It’s not politically correct to bring criminal charges against someone who is “mentally ill” and it’s not politically correct to prosecute him or to remove him from the campus. Yet that’s what was needed to protect the students. Two known episodes of stalking, setting a fire, and his threatening behavior in class should have been more than enough for the university administration to bring charges against him and to send him off campus.
Police need to be encouraged and empowered to treat potentially dangerous people more as criminals than as patients. In particular, men stalking women should be handled as definitively as any perpetrator of hate crimes. Regardless of whether the victims want to press charges, the police should. Cho shouldn’t have been allowed to get away with it a second time.
How would a police action have affected Cho? Would it have humiliated him and made him more violent? There’s no way to have certainty about this, but anyone with experience dealing with threatening people knows that a good dose of “reality,” a confrontation with the law, is much more of a wake up call and a deterrent than therapeutic coddling. Furthermore, involuntary psychiatric treatment is one of the more humiliating experiences in American society, and tends to make people more angry, not less.
Mental health interventions do not protect society because the person is almost always quickly discharged because his insurance coverage has run out or because mental health professionals, who as a group have no particular capacity to make such determinations, will decide that the patient is no longer a danger to himself or others. Indeed, in December 2005, when the university obtained a temporary detention order against Cho, a magistrate referred him for a mental health evaluation that found “his insight and judgment are normal.” Need I say more about the hazards of relying on mental health screening and evaluation to identify dangerous perpetrators–even after they have already been threatening people?
The only way to efficiently deal with killers, islamic or not, is to kill them first. Preferably faster and bloodier.
http://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html#2068913861987504379#2068913861987504379
You might like Gri’ms take.