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In high school a group of us used to engage in elaborate plotting of the murder (most frequently the poisoning of her ever present coffee) of a particularly hated teacher.
I can still spend hours plotting my suicide. But I've never been suicidal.
The great problem is that among a thousand people who say "I'll kill you" only one does it. Among hundreds of thousands of excluded, hateful, severely damaged children in the last 15 years who have had fantasies of mass revenge, only a dozen have acted on those fantasies.
The difficulty is that in this country we punish actions not thoughts. And, as much as we'd like to think otherwise, forced confinement to a hospital is still imprisonment. In watching this debate I am seeing a lot of people who are essentially saying that to avoid something like this it is better to "imprison" 100 innocent people to stop the one who would eventually be guilty.
Thinking back on that kid who went to court trying to reject traditional treatment for cancer. The general consensus is that it can't be forced. Does this apply to mental illness? What level of mental illness? What types? Does this have scary implications since we, as a society, seem to increasingly medicalize normal variation in mood, behavior, and characteristic?
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