[Vision2020] Noble Found Not Guilty Due to Temporary Insanity

[Andreas Schou]

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 7:53 PM, Art Deco <deco at moscow.com> wrote:
> Sunil, Andreas,
>
> So you think that someone with mental health issues doesn't realize that
> things are not just right?

Wayne --

He was driving around in his pajamas and babbling nonsense, looking
for his wife in Pullman when she was actually at home. I am fairly
confident in saying that he didn't understand that something just
wasn't right.

> There may be a few cases where that is true, but it is hard to believe that
> people do not realize that they are beginning to experience problems.

Believe what you like. Realize that the medical community knows
differently. In psychiatry, the term for what you don't believe in is
"impaired insight," or, in the case of brain injuries and stroke,
"anosagnosia." A random survey of PubMed indicates that most
symptomatic and almost half of remitted Bipolar I patients have
impaired insight.

You don't have a second, supervisory brain monitoring your first
brain. When you're nuts, you're globally nuts. You're not just
situationally nuts.

> In the case of Noble, among other things, the reports are that he was
> consuming copious amounts of caffeine based energy drinks.  Can not a person
> know that such behavior is not normal, that something is wrong, and
> something needs to be done?  And that failure to do so may result in some
> unpredictable, possibly destructive incidents?

I am unwilling to believe that you really believe that psychosis and
car accident are a reasonable consequence of drinking a few too many
energy drinks.

> Nor is a mental illness a white/black phenomenon.  It is a continuum.  A
> person is not totally mentally healthy one day, then in the state of having
> lost their mind the next.

"Tracy said Noble's wife, Kathy, told investigators he started acting
strangely about three days earlier, was not sleeping at night and
seemed confused." So, not one day. Three.

> How is a developing mental health problem any different from when people
> start to drink too much alcohol?  Or start to cough too much?

The difference is that it's not their fault. It's still their
responsibility, but it's not their fault.

> I simply do not by the argument that people with mental health issues are so
> afflicted from the onset that they are unable to recognize that a problem
> exists, and are unable to do anything about it.

You seem to think this is a matter of opinion. I am confused as to why.

-- ACS