One thing I learned working on the jail ward at LA County Hospital: do not attack a police officer with a weapon (or even your fists). They and their cohorts will ALWAYS respond with overwhelming, unrelenting force. They are armed, organized. determined to and legally allowed to defend themselves. Most of the young men admitted to that jail ward either didn’t know, had forgotten, or chose to ignore that obvious truth.
This unfortunate truth on occasion causes grave harm to young men with mal-functioning brains (“mental illness”). The solution is not to disarm police, but to return to a system where such individuals can more easily be kept apart from the rest of society, for everyone’s safety. Closing mental hospitals in the 60s and 70s after the introduction of effective anti-psychotic medications was a BIG mistake, in retrospect.
Mental Hospital, Insane Asylum, Booby Hatch, Funny Farm – whatever the moniker, they were an accepted part of life as I was growing up. My mother, during her pursuit of a doctorate in clinical psychology, worked for years in the ‘60s at the Rollman Psychiatric Institute in Cincinnati. The summer after my college freshman year (1967), I worked as an intern on the men’s inpatient psychiatric ward at Cincinnati General Hospital. Ken Kesey wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1962; the movie version appeared in 1975.
Such places were dehumanizing warehouses. Initially developed in the nineteenth century, they served to isolate those whose brains malfunctioned from the rest of society. Inmates were kept safe from their inability navigate the simplest tasks. Other people were kept safe from the afflicted’s lack of social grace. By hiding them away often behind locked doors, they had less opportunity to act on whatever random uncontrolled anger or fantasy prowled through their consciousness.
Two current dilemmas stem from the unwillingness of society to lock away people who are unable to manage the chaos which erupts in a disordered brain. A small percentage, after gaining access to deadly weapons, strike out, sometimes killing others. A larger number, but still small compared to the population of “mentally ill”, are unable to construct a stable life. They appear in tents along city backroads, disrupting the feeling of civility in crowded cities.
I don’t know if locking away those who can’t or won’t take the drugs which might help them, or those who have lost the support that family, a job, or a social network might provide is the, or even an answer. I suspect we need to try something to bring them back into our world.