Patricia J. Williams | August 8, 2012
Consider these scenarios. A popular college student leaves his fraternity house one day, stark naked. He walks three blocks to a stranger’s house, enters, turns on the TV and falls asleep. Moments later, the owner of the house finds him, takes aim with his Glock and kills the young man before he ever wakes up.
Or: an 18-year-old high school basketball star calls 911 to report child abuse because he can’t find any Chinese food in the house. When the police contact his mother, she rushes home to find her son sobbing on the front porch while a confused sergeant stares, watching his tears flow like rain.
Or: a young woman in Nebraska disappears the night before her parents’ thirtieth anniversary celebration—a surprise party she’d spent months planning. Two days later, she is found in Singapore, where she’s been picked up for shoplifting. Though Singapore has some of the harshest criminal penalties in the world, it also has some of the best mental-health care. So, rather than receiving a caning, the young woman is retrieved from a first-class hospital, diagnosed and medicated, her equilibrium restored.
Mental illness in the United States is misunderstood, criminalized, stigmatized and insufficiently covered even by so-called Cadillac insurance plans. If you think you don’t know anyone coping with psychosis or depression, you’re wrong: 58 million Americans (one in five) have some form of mental illness. If most of us don’t realize its prevalence, it’s surely because we’re afraid to talk about it. We’re a nation of fundamentalists about personal agency, and we’re skeptical of mental disorders as “real.” When a friend’s son wrote his family that he just wanted to lie down and die, one faction sent him Bible passages and told him to pray harder, while another sent him a copy of Ayn Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and told him to “take responsibility” for his life.
The insistence that the mentally ill are rational actors informs public policy, too: Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, received treatment only so that a court could declare him competent to stand trial. Since 2009, states have slashed more than $1.6 billion from mental-health programs. There are no savings to be gained from such cuts. They simply transfer the costs elsewhere: nearly half of all state and federal prisoners and approximately one-third of the nation’s homeless are mentally ill. Since much mental disease can be treated, this represents a human rights crisis as well as a spectacular waste of human resources.
Indeed, the comments on websites discussing James Holmes’s massacre in Colorado look right past its very bizarreness. “He just wants attention” is a typical remark. Any recognition that Holmes’s acts were terribly sick is accompanied by the assumption that his state must have been immediately obvious to everyone around him, as well as an underestimation of how hard it is to intervene or hospitalize an adult who does not voluntarily seek help.
The New York Times Magazine recently published a piece by Jeneen Interlandi chronicling her family’s struggle to help her father when he developed bipolar disease. She describes the gut-wrenching vigil for someone slowly transforming into a different person, as well as the near impossibility of procuring treatment if the sufferer “presents well” to psychiatrists or police. To commit her father involuntarily, she states, “he had to be an imminent danger to himself or others…in practice, it seemed to mean that he had to be standing on the ledge of a building, or holding a knife to someone’s throat.” The family ended up “locked in a game of chicken: waiting for my father to do something clearly dangerous; praying like hell that it would not be his suicide or accidental death or the death of someone else.”
Tragedies like the one in Aurora always prompt calls for more regulation: that schools be sued, psychologists lose their licenses, hospitals lock more people up. This implies some recognition that untreated mental illness is a public concern. Yet there’s no willingness to reconfigure our insurance system as a public good, or to fund any services that might alleviate the problem. So we are left with narrow remedies like lawsuits after the fact, inadvertently creating incentives for employers to fire mentally ill workers and for schools to expel those who need help the most—or, even worse, to overreact by “taking no chances.”
Risk assessment is an imperfect science, and our extraordinary level of violence only adds to the problem. We legitimize our trigger- happiness by imagining our polity as a war zone, “standing our ground” and girding our loins for the apocalypse. After Holmes’s slaughter, gun sales in Colorado leaped by 40 percent. There are those who insist that gun ownership rates have no causal relation to the rate of gun deaths. It’s a pitched argument (gun ownership is even mandatory in some US towns), unlikely to be settled by the numbers. But can we at least agree that there’s a kind of madness in peddling guns to every American (the NRA sells baby bibs featuring its logo) while decimating our mental health system?
We are all so vulnerable. We are subject to mental disorder as individuals in a toxically stressed modern world. We are subject to disorder based on biological clocks we do not fully understand (most mental illnesses tend to manifest in early adulthood). And we are subject to disorder as groupthink, ideological puritanism and religious extremism.
As I prepare to file this piece, word comes that yet another “lone gunman” has entered a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and killed six people. The FBI has declared it “terrorism.” The Westboro Baptist Church calls it the “beautiful work of an angry God.” CNN’s Eric Marripodi has declared it an “unfair targeting” of Sikhs mistaken for Muslims (a presumably fairer target?). Wisconsin State Representative Mark Honadel declared it “craziness.”
Perhaps one day we’ll know.
For more information about mental disease–including definitions, current research, and local resources–please consult the following websites: The National Alliance on Mental Illness, http://www.nami.org; The Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, http://www.bbrfoundation.org; the Treatment Advocacy Center, http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org; and The National Institute of Mental Health, http://www.nimh.nih.gov.
License and Liberty
Fred Phelps’s Westboro Baptist Church is an alarming coven of zealots. Somehow they find the energy to picket everything from Comic-Con (“an excuse for whores to wear skimpy get-ups”) to the funeral of Mr. Rogers (for teaching tolerance to children) to the Golden Globe Awards (because “people chase after frivolity and vanity when they ought to turn back to their Lord Jesus Christ and_Repent and Obey”). Prejudiced in the broadest sense, they maintain that Catholics are the “most hateful people on earth”; Muhammad was a “whoremonger”; and “Jews are the real Nazis.”
It’s not surprising, then, that the Supreme Court created a stir with its recent holding inSnyder v. Phelps that freedom of expression precludes the government from punishing Westboro for picketing the funerals of private citizens with hateful epithets. The opinion, however, is quite narrow — the Court held only that the political content of Westboro’s rhetoric was protected by the First Amendment against torts of intentional infliction of emotional distress — and the popular impression that Westboro is now free to shout its fire and brimstone at funerals willy-nilly is misleading. Indeed, in the incident in question, Westboro complied with police requests to stay 1,000 feet from the funeral, and all but the tops of its members’ signs were hidden from mourners’ view.
What is most interesting, therefore, about Westboro’s social challenge was not really in the suit. Indeed, the general revulsion at the Snyder decision is probably underwritten less by the particulars of the case than by concerns about the Phelps family’s sanity: about their ghoulish haunting of funerals, their open calls for hatred, the sad plight of the smallest of their children holding God Hates Fags signs, as well as the enormous publicity that always attends such a sorry little band. The issues at stake go beyond free speech and touch on communications technology, profit, celebrity and mental health. Consider, for example, what happened in the wake of Jared Lee Loughner’s rampage in Tucson, when it was reported that the Westboro church “agreed” not to protest at the funerals of the shooting victims. But agreement implies agency, rationality, capacity to contract. How did Westboro — which claims to have picketed more than 44,000 events in more than 813 cities — suddenly become so “agreeable,” anyway?
As it turned out, there was indeed an explicit bargain not to protest in exchange for airtime on two radio stations. Arrangements like this have worked for Westboro before; most notoriously, it received lots of airtime in exchange for not picketing the funerals of five Amish schoolgirls killed by a gunman in 2006. Margie Phelps, a lawyer for the church, said that such contracts were made based on how much publicity they would get: “It’s how many ears we can reach. That is our job; that is our goal.”
That Westboro was not at the Arizona funerals was good news, but the transaction behind it is worrisome. Conservative host Mike Gallagher, one of the radio personalities who “donated” an hour on his show, said, “I don’t like the idea of giving them the satisfaction of this, but I believe my radio airwaves are less important than them hurting families.” But Gallagher’s nationally syndicated show reaches millions of listeners. Was Westboro’s absence really “worth” such broad access to so “many ears”? Gallagher positioned “his” airwaves as some kind of chit to be traded according to no bounds but his own. The deal had more than a whiff of extortion about it, like children who declare that they will stop screaming only if their parents let them have that candy bar NOW! What’s at work is less free speech than plain old bullying, shot through with entertainment value — a show that will get everyone’s juices jumping, better than a fistfight on Jerry Springer.
A week before the show aired, Gallagher gave lip service to balancing the program with moderating voices. In getting his network to agree, he said that it was important to have “a skilled, intellectual theologian type” in the studio at the same time. “So we invited the great Dinesh D’Souza to also be a part of this very important broadcast.”
One hardly knows whether to laugh or cry. Dinesh D’Souza? The one who blamed the “cultural left” for 9/11 because “what disgusts [Muslims] are not free elections but the sight of hundreds of homosexuals kissing each other and taking marriage vows.” The same D’Souza who believed that torture at Abu Ghraib “didn’t represent the values of conservative America” but rather “the sexual immodesty of liberal America.” D’Souza! Who as editor of The Dartmouth Review, published a vulgar satire of Jewish students’ celebration of Succoth.
Gallagher continued: “We’ve managed to do what the courts have been unable to do, and that is stop the Westboro Baptist Church from going to hurt these particular families…. We’re very proud of that, especially in the light of…this horrendous accusation that talk-radio somehow led to the events of last Saturday…with our so-called inflammatory rhetoric.”
And so the broadcast went forth to the multitudes, on January 17, Martin Luther King Day. Phelps’s daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper spoke in a soothing rush of soft urgency, declaring that final destruction is imminent. “God hates,” she said in her agreeably dulcet way; it’s just “His perfect righteous determination.” She called the Tucson shooting a “God-smack,” and complained “the media has shut the door to the word of God.” “The federal judge in Arizona [one of the murdered victims]…is paying the down payment for putting us on trial.”
My belief in free speech extends, with some distaste, to the Mike Gallagher Show. I believe that words ought to be countered with more words. I am not sure, however, if simple ideological commitment to free speech is sufficient when the ability to have one’s words heard is so linked to wealth and to access to complex propagandistic magnifications of the human voice. And I remain very unsure if the gospel of violent vengeance, which so titillates mass media, is not providing the basis for prophecy of its own.
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