Our Mentally Ill Population is Dangerous

During the 1960's, all of the states practically emptied their mental hospitals in order to avoid encroaching on the civil rights of those inmates who were hospitalized wrongly for supposed mental illness and whose civil rights were being violated by their detention. Hoards of disabled and mentally ill people were turned out on the streets of America to fend for themselves in a society where they were practically helpless. As a result, they became the homeless of America. Many were encarcerated in prisons or just left to forage in the streets, living under bridges and in gutters. In my own experience, many were housed in special wards of low income nursing homes. Their maintenance there is inadequate. These nursing homes do not provide locked environments for the violent and dangerous, so...these patients are free to roam the neighborhoods, acting in bizarre ways--sometimes dangerous to others in the society.

Very inadequate provisions were made for their out-patient care and supervision.

One such person described in the first paragraph is Jared Loughner, the alleged killer of six persons in Tucson. Laughner had exhibited strange behavior causing him to be expelled from his community college because the students and teacher were afraid of him. A few days later, the fatal shooting began.

About 16,000 murders occur in the United States yearly. 10% of these are committed by persons with serious mental illness.

It is far past the time when America should pay adequate attention to the needs of our liberated mental illness patients by providing out-patient care for them. One problem with out-patient care, however is that many patients with chronic mental illness refuse to take medications that are capable of normalizing their behavior.

New York has a law that makes provision for involuntary admission to a mental hospital if the patient refuses to take his court-ordered psychotropic medications.
Other states should follow New York's example in this kind of legislation. Our society should have mercy on these mental patients and on others around them by providing adequate care and supervision.

Much of this blog post was excerpted from the Wall Street Journal 1/12/11, page A15.