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[Art Deco]

 [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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December 28, 2012
Guns and Mental Illness By JOE NOCERA

Many years ago, when I was a young reporter at Texas Monthly magazine, I
spent the better part of six months in the company of a man who suffered
from schizophrenia. His name was Fred Thomas; he was 23 years old; and he
had been steadily deteriorating since high school, which is when most men
first show symptoms of the disease.

I watched Fred as he was shuttled in and out of the state hospital in
Austin, Tex. — one of the few that had not been closed down by the
mid-1980s — where he was wildly overmedicated, and then released to either
his mother’s home, which was invariably disastrous, or a halfway house ill
equipped to help someone as delusional as he was.

I learned about the group homes that had sprung up after the closure of the
mental hospitals. They were so gruesome that one outplacement worker told
me she had never been to one “because I don’t want to know where I am
sending them.” I spent time at a homeless shelter that had become, in
effect, a mental institution without doctors or aides. Ultimately, the
article I wrote
<http://www.texasmonthly.com/preview/1986-11-01/feature4>was about how
the “deinstitutionalization movement” of the 1960s and early
1970s — a movement prompted by the same liberal impulses that gave us civil
rights and women’s rights — had become a national disgrace.

What spurs this recollection are two things. The first is Nina Bernstein’s
powerful report in The
Times<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/nyregion/new-yorks-mental-health-system-thrashed-by-services-lost-to-storm.html>this
week about the plight of the mentally ill in New York. Although the
article was pegged to the loss of services after Hurricane Sandy, in truth,
Sandy only exacerbated a situation that was already terrible. With the
mentally ill rarely institutionalized for any length of time — on the
theory that their lives will be better if they are not confined in a
hospital — other institutions have sprung up to take their place.

Prisons, for instance. According to E. Fuller
Torrey<http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/about-us/dr-e-fuller-torrey>,
a psychiatrist who founded the Treatment Advocacy Center, a staggering 20
percent of the prison population is seriously mentally ill. Around a third
of the homeless are mentally ill.

And one more statistic: “Ten percent of homicides are committed by
seriously mentally ill people who are not being treated,” says Torrey.

In the wake of the massacres in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn., there
have been essentially two central arguments about the cause. Liberals have
stressed the need for new gun regulations that would make it more difficult
for the likes of James Holmes and Adam Lanza to get ahold of killing
machines like semiautomatics. There is no lack of sensible ideas:
background checks for all gun purchasers, a national registry that would
allow guns to be traced, an assault weapons ban, controls on ammunition,
and so on. Nouriel Roubini, the economist, wrote in a Twitter message that
gun owners should be required to have liability
insurance<http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/12/gun-control-0http:/www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/12/gun-control-0>,
an intriguing idea. Some legislators who once blindly followed the bidding
of the National Rifle Association are now saying they are reconsidering in
the wake of Newtown.

Many conservatives, however, have placed the blame for the recent rash of
mass shootings not on the proliferation of guns but on the fact that James
Holmes and Adam Lanza were allowed to go about their business unfettered,
despite their obvious mental illness. The editorial writers at The Wall
Street Journal recently
wrote<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324907204578187412604319142.html>that
changing the way we treat the mentally ill “strikes us as a more
promising path” for reducing mass killings than a fight over gun control.

In truth, both are necessary. If conservatives need to face the need for
gun regulations — controls that will make guns less ubiquitous while still
staying on the right side of the Second Amendment — liberals need to
acknowledge that untreated mental illness is also an important part of the
reason mass killings take place. Yes, it is true, as has been noted in
recent weeks, that most mentally ill people don’t commit
crimes<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41002034/ns/slate_com/t/mental-illness-not-explanation-violence/#.UN5BIuQ73N6>.
But it is equally true that anyone who goes into a school with a
semiautomatic and kills 20 children and six adults is, by definition,
mentally ill.

The state and federal rules around mental illness are built upon a
delusion<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/magazine/when-my-crazy-father-actually-lost-his-mind.html>:
that the sickest among us should always be in control of their own
treatment, and that deinstitutionalization is the more humane route. That
is not always the case. Torrey told me that Connecticut’s laws are so
restrictive in terms of the proof required to get someone committed that
Adam Lanza’s mother would probably not have been able to get him help even
if she had tried.

“Mentally ill street people shame the society that lets them live as they
do,” I wrote toward the end of that article in Texas Monthly. It has been
50 years since deinstitutionalization became the way we dealt with the
mentally ill.

How much more proof do we need that it hasn’t worked?


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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