Mental illness crimes

What makes a person like Hinckley disabled His ability to shoot others, a premeditated crime that we interpret as a disability due to a disease. Disability produced by deviant ability is as different from disability due to physical limitation as mental illness is different from bodily illness. The bizarre act of a so-called mental patient, whether murder or self-mutilation, is a complex performance, an ability most people lack. In contrast, the disability of a physically sick person, such as blindness or paralysis, is the absence of an innate sensory or motor ability, not the lack of a social skill or the rejection of responsibility. Attributing adult dependency to disabling disease is as fallacious and misguided as is attributing crime to mental illness. 

The suspicion that, in the final analysis, mental illness is a disease sui generis, unique among diseases, is confirmed by the fact that it is the only disease believed to be capable of causing and excusing crime. In possessing this property, mental illness combines functions previously attributed to the Devil and God. Also, mental illness is the only disease that justifies, as hospitalization, the preventive detention of persons deemed dangerous to themselves and/or others and the incarceration of persons deemed to be sexual predators who have served their prison sentences. 

Psychiatrists, psychologists, philosophers, politicians, and others who labor to assimilate mental illness to body illness systematically fail to acknowledge that an intrinsic function—I would say primary function—of the mental hospital has always been the psychiatric segregation and control of unwanted persons, justified by their alleged dangerousness to themselves and/or others. This contention is confirmed by the whole history of psychiatry the so-called psychiatric abuses in National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union and the continued popularity, in the West, of psychiatric rationales and facilities for imprisoning individuals whose detention cannot be justified as punishment for crime.Recent opinions by Justices of the Supreme Court amply support this interpretation. 

My thesis regarding the relations between organic and mental illness thus both resembles and differs from Weyer s regarding the relations between natural and demonic illness. It resembles Weyer s in so tar as he maintains that merely because physicians cannot cure a disease, they should not inter from this that the disease is due to witchcraft. It differs from his in so tar as he proclaims his belief in witchcraft as a cause of illness and protests only that his colleagues make this diagnosis more often than they should. I hold that, like witchcraft, mental illness is a misconception which can " cause neither bodily illness nor crime. 

The person accused of mental illness is in a similar situation. He too, instead of being treated as a respectable adult suspected of crime, is treated in a paternalistic fashion, as might a naughty child by a father who knows best. Accounts of involuntary psychiatric interventions—and by this I mean any contact with a psychiatrist not actively sought by the patient—illustrate the similarities between the procedures characteristic of Institutional Psychiatry and of the Inquisition. A brief example should suffice here. 

In short, the inquisitor was not concerned with overt, antisocial acts that was a problem for the secular courts. He was interested in heresy, which was a crime against God and the Christian religion, and was therefore defined in theological terms. The institutional psychiatrist is likewise not concerned with overt, antisocial acts that is a problem for the criminal courts. He is interested in mental illness, which is an offense against the laws of mental health and the psychiatric profession, and is therefore defined in medical terms. Mental illness is the pivotal concept of institutional psychiatry, just as heresy was of inquisitorial theology. ... 

That both heresy and mental illness are thought-crimes, rather than act-crimes, helps to explain the repellent methods used to detect them. We cannot wonder, remarks Lea with a rare note of sarcasm, that he [the inquisitor] speedily emancipated himself from the trammels of recognized judicial procedure which. . . would have rendered his labors futile. a result, The heretic, whether acknowledged or suspected, had no rights. . . there was no hesitation in employing whatever means were readiest to save and advance the faith. i ... 

One of the important differences between a person accused of crime and one accused of mental illness is that the former is often allowed bail, whereas the latter never is. This distinction too may be found in the Inquisition. The question of bail for suspected heretics was considered by the fifteenth[Pg.53]

In short, even without counting those persons who are deprived of liberty because of mental retardation, more than twice as many Americans lose their freedom on account of mental illness than on account of crime. This loss of freedom, moreover, cannot be morally justified as either protection for the community or as treatment for the patient. Nevertheless, the American Civil Liberties Union has not only failed to oppose this practice but, on the contrary, has actively supported it. In his book on the history of the Union, Charles Markmann relates, with what seems to me badly misplaced pride, that toward the end of the Second World War, The [American Civil Liberties] Union. . . began to draft model statutes for the commitment of the insane.. . . Twenty years after the first Union draft of a model bill for commitments to mental hospitals. Congress enacted for the District of Columbia a law closely following the Union s proposals. ... 

The same relationship obtains between the modem madman and the Jew. Prior to his mental illness, the (non-Jewish) mental patient is a member of society his crime is madness—that is, rejection of the dominant secular ethic—and for this he is punished. The modern Jew, on the other hand, is i it a fully accepted part of society. A Jew among Christians (or, worse, among atheists, as in Soviet Russia) is regarded as an outsider sometimes, because it is believed that his presence is useful to the group, he is tolerated at other times, because it is believed that his presence is injurious... 

Rush also maintained that crimes were diseases. This idea is often credited, falsely, to modern psychiatrists. One of the classes of mental illnesses he devised he called derangements in the will. Murder and theft are symptoms of this disease-complex. I have selected, Rush writes, those two symptoms of this disease (for they are not vices) from its other morbid effects, in order to rescue persons affected with them from the arm of the law, and to render them the subjects of the kind and lenient hand of medicine. Just how kind and lenient Rush s hand was we shall see presently. It is worth noting that in the foregoing passage Rush admits, perhaps unwittingly, that he considers murder and theft diseases not because they are diseases, but to justify the transfer of murderers and thieves from the control of policemen and judges to that of physicians and the keepers of madhouses. 

This is no less dramatically true tor the folsity of the concept of mental illness than it is for that of masturbatory insanity. The National Association for Mental Health asserts, and American presidents endorse and repeat, that Mental illness is like any other illness. The facts are that American citizens may be hospitalized and treated against their will for mental illness, but not for any other may plead mental illness as an excuse to crime, but not any other and may obtain a divorce from their spouses disabled by mental illness, but not by any other. Yet, these facts have not weakened—indeed, perhaps they have strengthened—the psychiatric and popular view that mental disorders are medical diseases requiring care by physicians in hospitals. 

For the true anti-Semite, there can be no good Jew. The Jew, Sartre acutely observes, is free to do evil, not good he has only as much free will as is necessary for him to take full responsibility for the crimes of which he is the author he does not have enough to achieve a reformation. (Italics in the original.) For the conscientious mental health worker there can be no mental illness useful to the patient or society, nor any mental patient capable of achieving his own self-transformation. This justifies the debasement of all persons labeled mentally ill, and the imposition of treatment on any of them by the authorities (whether such treatment exists or not). 

Many addicts who end up in prison are mentally ill Imprisonment for crimes resulting from taking or selling illicit drugs is not a solution. 

The sociological study of crime, delinquency, drug-taking, mental illness and other forms of socially deviant or problematic behav-... 

Sugar Elimination. Sugar, primarily sucrose or table sugar, has been blamed for a variety of ills including behavior problems. Some popular theories suggest that the consumption of refined sugar causes hyperactivity, mental illness, juvenile delinquency, and crime. 

It is consistent with this close mental and verbal association between" crime and madness that commitment laws are formulated in terms of the individual s supposed dangerousness (to himself and others), rather than in terms of his health and illness. Dangerousness, of course, is a characteristic the alleged mental patient shares with the criminal, rather than with the medically ill person. 

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