Thursday, March 31, 2005 3:00 AM EST
By James J. Monahan
The story was printed, yet I had a lingering sense that the real story was untold. Behind many of these stories are two real victim groups who suffer for very different reasons.
The first group consists of the police officers involved in these shootings.
Little do we know how those officers feel when they go back to their cruisers and the station, filling out reams of paperwork, talking with supervisors, reliving the event. In fact, they grieve terribly and may relive this event for the rest of their lives, day and night. Many are sent to counselors for post-traumatic stress therapy in order to assist them get back on the job. Dirty Harry only exists on film.
The other victim group is the severely mentally ill and their families. When I was a graduate student in the late 1960s and ’70s, there was a movement to release patients from mental hospitals. Thorazine was found to harm the brain cells of patients and "community-based care" was seen as the more humane and cost-effective alternative.
State money was going to be saved!
They were released into a community ill-prepared to receive them. Living spaces were not organized and the local mental health centers were overwhelmed with the complexities of their needs and lives.
Neighbors didn’t like the idea of a group home in their neighborhood. People also discovered that the severely mentally ill often were not all that motivated to participate in their care, particularly if they were not taking their medications. The severely mentally ill did not thrive in a free and open environment that assumed motivation, functionality and structure.
After a while, these patients became the homeless or street persons. They also became drug addicts or "winos" — a whole new collection of minorities.
The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill indicates that the most severe forms of mental illness affect 5 million to 10 million adults and 3 million to 5 million children and adolescents. It estimates the annual cost of untreated mental illness in the United States is in excess of $100 billion per year.
In 2005, we still are talking about these new minorities, but fail to see them as they really are. We are failing millions of citizens who are suffering major mental illnesses through no fault of their own. They populate our church shelters, cardboard boxes, steam vents, trash dumps and our jails.
They are a major problem for our criminal justice system, since increasing numbers of them are being processed as criminals, when they and society would be better served by referral to a good, old-fashioned mental hospital.
Modern medications are highly effective when taken under the supervision of a trained psychiatrist, in settings appropriate to the patient’s mental status.
Recognizing this, the state Department of Correction recently converted one of its prisons into a mental hospital for mentally ill prisoners.
Part of the disorder of the mentally ill who run afoul of the law may involve a denial that they are ill and belief that others, such as the police, are the problem.
Current laws make it very unlikely these persons will receive the proper level of care that they need, especially if it needs to be involuntary. Placing all of this on the backs of our police is a travesty.
"Suicide by cop" should really be called "suicide by society." It is we who are killing them through our denial and simplistic thinking.
