Punishing people for mental illness is a return to the Dark Ages
My 22-year old daughter, diagnosed with bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, has refused treatment for four years. She self-medicates with marijuana, methamphetamine, and alcohol. Occasionally, she gets caught using or possessing drugs and is thrown in a county jail.
Punishing people for mental illness is a return to the Dark Ages
By Rachel Pruchno
POSTED: 01/17/2015 05:00:00 PM MST
This week, jury selection will begin in Aurora in the case of James Holmes. Central to the case is whether people with serious mental illness should be treated or punished.
Robert and Arlene Holmes acknowledge that some people view their son James as a monster. Certainly the rampage on July 20, 2012, that killed 12 people and injured 70 during the premier showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” in an Aurora movie theater was a monstrous act. But James is not a monster. He is a man who was suffering from untreated serious mental illness.
Holmes has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He doesn’t deny he was the shooter, but he and his attorneys claim he had been experiencing a psychotic episode. Now a sentencing trial will decide whether to execute him or imprison him for life.
Robert and Arlene Holmes believe both options are inappropriate. They want their son committed to life in an institution that would provide treatment for his mental illness. They want their sick child to get the help he needs.
They couldn’t be more right. It’s time to stop punishing people for having mental illness and start treating them instead. Our mental health system failed James Holmes, his family, and the public.
Sadly, the failure of our mental health system is all too familiar to me and to America’s millions of parents whose adult children have serious mental illness.
My 22-year old daughter, diagnosed with bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, has refused treatment for four years. She self-medicates with marijuana, methamphetamine, and alcohol. Occasionally, she gets caught using or possessing drugs and is thrown in a county jail.
While my daughter’s story isn’t nearly as horrific as that of James Holmes, at the root of both situations lies untreated mental illness.
According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, there are 3.8 million people in the United States with untreated serious mental illness. Nearly 750,000 adults are in jails awaiting trials or serving short sentences. An additional 1.48 million people fill our state and federal prisons. Among these 2.23 million incarcerated people, 14.5 percent of the men and 31 percent of the women suffer from serious mental illness.
2 Comments
Will
1) I have mental illness and know I can’t get away with pot, despite having the view point beer should be villianized above it (if anything), no matter how desperate I’d like to be able to calm down, relax, sleep, etc.
2) Psychotic episodes cited in the event of the Aurora shooting are not apt citations; Psychotic episodes do not involve meticulous planning and obsession…that is a different kind of mental illness. If that doesn’t define monsterous behavior – what does?
Associating the extreme and deadly type with the episodic type (seemingly random outburst) hurts the cause more than helps it.
Harassing someone for appearing anxious or nervous who only carries suffering for themselves, now that’s a cause I’d get behind.
Moises Silva
It is monstrous behaviour, but, I don’t believe in monsters, do you? those are fairy tales even as adults we tell ourselves to explain things we can’t explain (either due to lack of knowledge, mental/emotional capacity or both). Very much the same way through history we’ve always made up ways to explain natural phenomena (e.g thunders, lighting, death) using gods/religion, good/evil. I think in a 100 or more years they’ll look back at our barbaric/primitive practices in treating with the mentally ill, even with their ‘monstrous’ behaviour.