Complacency can't cure mental illness

Treatment for mental illness is essential

By Steve Blow

 

When I first began to educate myself about mental illness, 20 years ago or more, I repeatedly encountered a calming assurance:

"People with mental illness are no more dangerous than society at large, except perhaps to themselves."

That was part of the campaign to remove the stigma from mental illness. After all, hadn't pop culture always depicted "crazy people" with an ax in hand?

While I applaud the ongoing effort to erase that stigma, I wonder if we didn't let the safety assurance lull us into a certain complacency about mental illness.

For the moment, Cho Seung-Hui has blasted us from our complacency.

And though I would never want to go back to the days when "murder" and "mental illness" were synonymous, must we continue to shrug off these rampages by "misfits" and "loners" as inevitable?

They are not.

One thing about mental illness is known for sure: Treatment works. People with mental illnesses can be helped.

I see that NAMI – the National Alliance on Mental Illness – has slightly adjusted its basic statement. "People under treatment for mental illness are no more dangerous than society at large," NAMI legal director Ron Honberg told me yesterday.

"Under treatment" – a couple of very important added words.

I watched a Nightline interview with Lucinda Roy, the Virginia Tech English professor who tried two years ago to get mental treatment for an obviously disturbed Mr. Cho.

"I've been teaching for 22 years, and there have only been a couple of times when I thought that this is a really, really worrying thing. And this was one of them," Dr. Roy said.

"I kept saying to him, 'Please go to counseling. I will take you over to counseling myself,' because he was so depressed ... but apparently, I was told, you can't force someone to go to counseling.

"Even though I called counseling trying to get everyone to force him to go over, their hands were tied," she said.

And here we return to the discussion we had several months ago about Sabrina, the poor homeless woman with untreated mental illness who had made her home outside my office window.

Though common sense and human decency would have dictated that we force shelter and medical treatment on Sabrina, our laws made that impossible.

Now I have no idea what has become of her. She has disappeared. I pray she is safe. But the life expectancy of women living on the street is brutally short.

Common sense and human decency also would have dictated some mandated treatment for the tormented Mr. Cho. But the law put that out of reach, as well. And here we are.

This situation is an understandable overreaction to abuses of the past, when the mentally ill were confined too often and too long. But it's time for the pendulum to swing back to a more sensible middle.

That's slowly happening. The Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va., is leading the way. NAMI has fiercely defended the rights of the mentally ill, but I heard a more balanced view in my talk yesterday with Mr. Honberg.

"While we're always concerned about protecting people's civil rights, we think laws that don't allow for intervention until people are overtly dangerous may not make sense," he said. "They may not be in society's best interest, and they are definitely not in the best interest of people who are suffering."

Here in Dallas, mental health professionals and the courts are now hammering out new policies to mandate treatment before tragedy occurs.

Will more proactive treatment stop every killing rampage? Of course not. And maybe that shouldn't even be our primary concern.

More proactive treatment would have spared Mr. Cho from years of mental anguish. And probably, almost certainly, this would be just another week at Virginia Tech.

Steve Blow is a columnist for the Dallas Morning News.