Virginia vs. Iraq

[Prudence]

Mental illness is still seen as a personal failing - a choice someone has made to not think "appropriately". And because it's not considered a "real" illness, there is great resistance to expanding treatment options. People who are depressed should get over it. People who are psychotic should be locked up where we don't have to interact with them. In fact, I think many people associate psychosis with criminal behavior - not that psychosis leads to criminal behavior, but that being psychotic is in itself a criminal act, justifying incarceration.

It's a choice society has made. We - not individually, but as a society - have decided that mental illness is an willful individual flaw that we're not going to support treatment for something that's all in someone's head. Of course, that means things like this happen, but that's seen as just evidence of how awful the shooter was, not how difficult it is to access appropriate mental health treatment. And we all know the shooter was awful or he wouldn't have had any psychosis in the first place, right?

[blueerica]

While I do agree that there should be higher quality mental services available, I do not see how it could have prevented what happened this past Monday. Outside of willfully submitting oneself to therapy, treatment and counseling, there is nothing we could have done, or should have done. Up until Monday, from what I could tell, Cho had committed no crime other than being a creep - and how many creeps are out there in the world?

I do not want to see witch-hunts against those whom some perceive as having an illness.

I don't want to see us turn back to a time of forced treatments.

I'm struggling, for some reason, to find a way to explain what I'm trying to get at... I guess most of all, I believe that forcing treatment is a slippery slope. We can say now that this will be a benefit, but who is to say that it can't turn into a tool for persecution, a different sort of imprisonment - perhaps for even those who do not suffer from any mental illness... a tool to lock away the opposition. Call them crazy, and have them be gone. I know that's pretty extreme, but it is possible. Plus, my freedoms are all I really have, even if they are perceived. I don't want what shreds are left to be decided for myself to be taken away.

So yes, I think we need to have better mental services available. Forcing it, labeling people, and perhaps unnecessarily incarcerating them in a facility is not a choice we should make for people.