Mental illness hits the headlines – again

Those suffering from mental illness – for the most part – live quietly on the fringe of society, unnoticed by any other than their own families. Unfortunately, a few lash out and grab the headlines as Cho Seung-Hui did last week ago at Virginia Tech. Afterwards, individuals who knew him compiled a latent picture of concern.

Cho’s roommates viewed him as a quiet, uncommunicative student whose sleep pattern changed recently. One staff member had a code word arranged to alert security if he turned violent. One professor refused to teach him. A couple of co-eds wanted him to back off from stalking them. A district court in Virginia’s Montgomery County ruled that Cho was an “imminent danger to himself.”

No one thought his condition serious enough to get a court order for him be hospitalized or to undergo mandatory treatment.
“We always joked we were just waiting for him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did,” said classmate, Stephanie Derry.
Cho’s behavior caused concern, but not alarm. His story is not unique.
In the late 1970s, John Hinckley Jr.’s immaturity and lack of direction concerned his parents. They sent him to a professional counselor for help. The counselor told his parents to withdraw their support and force him to assume responsibility for himself. A month later he attempted to kill then-president Ronald Reagan.
Only then did his family hear about his delusions and erratic actions and see Cho-like pictures of their son holding a gun to his head. A jury declared him to be mentally ill. Hinckley has spent the last 25 years at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., under psychiatric care.

After their son’s arrest, Hinckley’s parents received letters and phone calls from strangers who said that when the news first broke they each feared the shooter had been their loved one.
The discovery of Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski after 18 years of bombs came about when his brother David Kaczynski saw similarities in the writing style in the Unabomber’s published manifesto and alerted authorities.
Families, friends … even community mental health centers will continue to be concerned, but two factors prevent any major change in the status quo.

First and foremost, as a country, we maintain a rigid adherence to personal rights and mandate only that the most serious, threatening mentally ill persons be mandated to take medication and/or submit to hospitalizations.
Secondly, repeatedly state and nationally elected representatives refuse to fund the buildings, staffing and upkeep of hospital beds for the seriously mentally ill or to develop the laws providing insurance parity for those with mental health problems.

The headlines will come again. But, equally tragic are obscure stories such as the Arkansas parents who watched their son slowly starve himself to death fearing the food offered to him had been poisoned. It took months to obtain a court order which allowed the family to intervene. After proper medication returned him to sanity, one of his first questions was “Why did you wait so long?”

It is a question we will continue to ask in this country where we uphold the rights of the individuals with severe mental illness to refuse help or medication. It is a right we protect frequently to their personal detriment, and infrequently to the detriment of those around them.