This essay is propaganda promoting more taxpayer funded psychiatric treatment. It is misguided to rely on Treatment Advocacy Center, a lobbyist for the psychiatric industry run by E. Fuller Torrey who promotes treatment not rights of persons with disabilities. Suggesting police should treat violent criminals differently based on a psychiatric diagnosis is irrational. There is no evidence that the diagnosis causes violence and crime.
When confronted by a violent person who threatens the safety of an officer, or another person, are the police supposed to stop, take cover and wait for a psychiatrist to talk to the suspect while the officer watches and protects the psychiatrist? Are police supposed to force drugs on the suspect? This essay promotes treatment over public safety. It is similar to the arguments of CAIR and extremist liberals who argue that Middle Eastern Muslim immigrants should not be suspected of terrorism, because it is profiling. Rational bias is ignored endangering public safety. Persons with disabilities who commit a crime should be treated the same as persons without disabilities. The initial error is calling police and expecting them to treat children as patients. That is not what police are for. The argument that psychiatric diagnoses are no different than physical illnesses is another element of psychiatric propaganda.
Psychiatric illnesses have no pathology. They are made up by consensus, not science. Psychiatric illnesses are protected speech and behavior, which psychiatrists do not like or do not understand. Psychiatric industry lobbyists, e.g., NAMI and Treatment Advocacy Center promote false narratives, e.g., that mental illness is a chemical imbalance of the brain. When challenged the American Psychiatric Association was unable to provide evidence of any imbalance or even for a chemical balance of the brain. They promote multi color images of the brain claiming that is mental illness. Soon they will demand compulsory MRIs to force treatment on all people with colorful brain images.
Psychiatric diagnoses are personal opinion masquerading as science. Psychiatry is a means of social control with no due process protections. This essay promotes using psychiatric diagnoses instead of the constitution and laws for taking freedom and using the legitimate state police power to control human behavior based on psychiatric diagnoses, not law. Curious that after gun violence or police shootings of civilians, liberals blame guns, and demand more gun laws; while conservatives blame psychiatric diagnoses and demand more taxpayer funded treatment. "The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." - H. L. Mencken. "One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them." - Thomas Sowell.
[From article]
Quintonio LeGrier’s father called police after locking himself in a bedroom when his son menaced him with a baseball bat. When the police arrived, LaGrier, a 19-year-old with emotional problems, allegedly charged them with the bat. An officer shot him dead, and accidentally killed a neighbor as well.
The heart-rending case is, tragically, almost routine. Consider two other recent cases. On Dec. 29, Siolosega Velega-Nuufolau of Santa Nella, California, a 50-year-old woman with mental problems, was shot dead when allegedly charging a sheriff’s deputy with a kitchen knife. On Dec. 19, police killed Ruben Jose Herrera, a 26-year-old Los Angeles-area man suffering from bipolar disorder, when he allegedly lunged for an officer’s gun in the hospital.
[. . .]
For all the attention devoted to police-involved shootings and race, mental illness is the more salient issue. A joint report by the Treatment Advocacy Center and National Sheriffs’ Association in 2013 examined cases between 1980 and 2008, and estimated that roughly half involved people with mental illness. A Washington Post analysis of 1,000 fatal police shootings in 2015 puts it at about a quarter.
These shootings are another tragic symptom of our contemptible outsourcing of the severely mental ill to law enforcement. The police are our de facto front-line mental-health workers — “armed social workers” in the pungent phrase of one observer — and jails are our de facto psychiatric hospital system.
[. . .]
It’s a poignant lament, but why do the families of the severely mentally ill need to rely on the police for medical assistance? When someone has a heart attack or gets cancer, we don’t call the police.
[. . .]
A more rational and humane policy would give families robust treatment options before it gets to the point of calling the cops. This would mean more psychiatric hospital beds and more options for mandated care. Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) has a bill to push the mental-health system in this direction.
The alternative is to continue to default to police to cope with out-of-control people, often brandishing weapons, and hope for the best — and brace for the worst.
http://nypost.com/2016/01/04/dumping-americas-mental-health-woes-on-the-cops/
Dumping America’s mental-health woes on the cops
By Rich Lowry
New York Post
January 4, 2016 | 1:46pm
* * *
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429164/police-shootings-mental-illness-problem?target=author&tid=900170
Outsourcing the Mentally Ill to Police
by RICH LOWRY
January 1, 2016 12:00 AM
National Review
Dumping America’s mental-health woes on the cops
By Rich Lowry
New York Post
January 4, 2016 | 1:46pm
* * *
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429164/police-shootings-mental-illness-problem?target=author&tid=900170
Outsourcing the Mentally Ill to Police
by RICH LOWRY
January 1, 2016 12:00 AM
National Review
