John Zawahri
We don’t yet know the reason why John Zawahri put on body armor, then picked up several guns and a lot of ammunition to go on a shooting rampage in Santa Monica, CA. He might have been a home-grown terrorist but terrorists don’t typically start out by killing their own family members. That behavior is more often found in the severely mentally ill who have become dangerous to themselves and others. One law enforcement source said of Zawahri that, “he had suffered mental health issues and was hospitalized a few years ago after allegedly talking about harming someone.”
Voluntary Treatment
In reading about the mentally ill, I see assertions from mental health experts that treatment and commitment should be voluntary. In @WSJ, Mr. Fields quotes Ira Burnim of the Bazelton Center for Mental Health, an advocacy group in Washington D.C. “Mr. Burnim argues for a system of ‘assertive community treatment’ in which therapists work with patients to help them build the habits needed to stick to their therapy.” Mr. Burnim thinks it’s essential for everything to be done voluntarily, “which means the patients buy into the treatment plan.”
An article in the June issue of @MotherJonesby Mac McClelland entitled, “Schizophrenic. Killer. My Cousin,” repeats this theme. Ms. McClelland quotes Cindy Gyori, executive director of Hyde Street Community Services, a mental-health center in San Francisco. Ms. Gyori thinks that mentally ill people “should be able to do whatever they choose until they’re a danger—just like non-mentally ill people. She finds involuntary treatment laws “stupid,” even though studies show that they “decrease the rates of violence and hospitalization and incarceration among severely mentally ill patients.”
To me, this approach is the triumph of wishful thinking—and the denial of stark reality—over simple common sense. The National Association of Mental Illness defines the condition thusly, “Mental illnesses are medical conditions that disrupt a person’s thinking, feeling, mood, ability to relate to others and daily functioning. Just as diabetes is a disorder of the pancreas, mental illnesses are medical conditions that often result in a diminished capacity for coping with the ordinary demands of life.”
Just Two Questions
As a layperson, I have two questions:
Brain Mapping
Question #1: How does anyone, even a psychiatrist or other mental-health professional, know when a mentally-ill person becomes a danger? No psychiatric tests exist to tell us this. While we can map the physiological brain and tell what parts of it are active, we can’t decipher the thought processes going on inside it. In the body we can check cholesterol levels, sugar levels, or blood pressure to determine when they are dangerously high. But there is no way to tell precisely when the voices a schizophrenic hears have flipped from saying benign things to telling a young man he needs to kill.
Predictable Tragedy
These attitudes on the part of lawmakers and mental-health professionals are the height of denial and innocent people are paying the price for it. Loving families, the first line of support for the mentally ill, cannot get information about their child’s condition, treatment, medication, or status. Without authorization, they cannot even pick up their child’s medications. Given the severely reduced funding and lack of resources for the mentally ill in the United States, this makes no sense at all.
A National State of Denial
Does this make any sense? This week we can ask that question of the victims’ families in Santa Monica, just as we might have asked it of grieving families in Newtown CT, Aurora CO, and Tucson AZ. Where will we ask it when the next predictable tragedy happens?