Posted on 04/23/2007 12:57:30 PM PDT by pabianice
This month’s massacre of disarmed students and faculty at Virginia Tech was preordained and takes me back to my experience with the violent mentally ill. My brother worked in Vermont’s Waterbury Mental Hospital in the 70s and 80s. He worked to keep some sense of order among the wing housing the criminally insane. At 5’ 5” and 145 pounds, he seemed a strange pick to work with violent, 200-pound psychopaths and he had fractures and lacerations too numerous to count. But he was more successful in reaching these deranged inmates than most other staffers so he was kept at it. Then, in the late-70s and mid-80s, the Patients’ Rights Movement burst upon psychiatry and he watched in dismay as many clearly dangerous offenders were released with the admonition to “take their medicine.” He predicted a catastrophe.
In the 80s and 90s it seemed that everyone had a horror story about the deinstitutionalized insane. In the 1990s I became intimately acquainted with the insane on a daily basis. Every day I took the commuter train to and from Boston’s South Station. South Station had become home to a colorful population of the insane, some calm, others violent. It was clear that Boston – home of arguably the most delusional liberals in the United States – was spending most of its time hiding its problems rather than actually fixing them. Haunting South Station were the fruits of “mental patients’ rights.”
There was the Paper Clip Lady. A shambling wreck of a woman – perhaps 40, perhaps 70 – she stumbled through the crowds in a filthy trench coat despite the weather. Her long, foul hair hung in slimy glory about her white, puffy face as she had a never-ending argument with someone no one else could see. Her eyes glazed and ablaze at the same time, she held a straightened paper clip in her right hand, jabbing forcefully with it toward her imaginary opponent as she ranted and hectored in meaningless sentence fragments. In between harangues, she would stab herself under her fingernails with the paper clip, creating new freshettes of blood running down her hand and arm to join the gory dam of half-dried blood turning her sleeve into something like furry raw liver. Commuters kept a wary eye on The Paperclip Lady and if she was near one of the station’s benches, the seat behind her was always kept open in case she decided to suddenly sit down while scolding her imaginary enemy.
There was Agent Mulder, a middle-aged man always wearing a sweater vest and a paperback book. Not obviously insane on first glance, he would take the opportunity to sit down across from you if there was an empty chair at the table you were using while waiting for your train. Once you glanced up in surprise he would stare at you levelly as he showed you a book about alien abductions and began earnestly telling you about the danger everyone was in from space invaders, all in a calm if intense tone, and advising you to be on the lookout.
There was The Ambassador, who wore a filthy overcoat and huge galoshes as he prowled the ramps along the train tracks. As you disembarked, he would suddenly be at your side, eyes wild, finger pointing, his unwashed face a writhing thing of madness, as he followed you into the station while loudly telling you something in no language ever spoken in Boston. Once he had reached the station, without pause, he would turn on his heel, attach himself to someone walking out to their train, and continue the exhortation.
I left my job in Boston after a while and never again had to encounter these beneficiaries of liberal benevolence, though I have often wondered how many of those who emptied the asylums ever had to take the train to and from South Station (let me guess – ah, none?) That Seung-hui Cho slaughtered 32 people isn’t the news. The real story is how the Left deliberately went out of its way to help create this massacre by freeing the crazy and disarming the sane in order that they might feel good about themselves, far from either Virginia Tech or South Station.
What amazes me is even after everyone realized this wasn’t working, there was no movement to recreate the institutions needed to take care of these pathetic and often dangerous victims of mental illness.
individual wards from the defunded/closed asylums are now in our neighborhoods disguised as group homes.......incidents arising from them are suppressed in the media
Hey baby, wanna go out?
Everyone knows it was the cruel, heartless cutbacks of the eeeevil Reagan administration that caused all those mentally challenged victims to be turned out on the streets!
They are like Dr. Werner von Braun in the Tom Lehrer song of that name, "Vonce da rockets are up, who cares vere de come down / Dot's not my department, says Werner von Braun."
Congressman Billybob
Not amazing at all. States that first initiated “de-institutionalization” did so as the result of lawsuits from human rights activists and the ACLU. Legislation dictated the rest. The one thing that they forgot was that there was no real safety net in communities capable of taking care of these people.
Community hospitals and mental health centers, not even close to being capable of dealing with this population on any kind of long term basis, now have their emergency departments and psych units clogged up with revolving door, chronically mentally ill patients that can’t pay for their services, ultimately driving these services out of business.
If you ask any given state health official about it, they’ll throw up their hands and say...”We did what we were mandated to do. Now, it’s up to the communities to handle it.” This is much cheaper for the states in the short run, but much more costly to communities and society in the long run.
Respectfully submitted by one who has served in the mental health field for over 30 years.......
Militant
Many of the “homeless” who occupy Tent Cities are mentally deranged. Some have admitted this in townhall forums.
Those who promote Tent Cities are often in league with those who released the insane from institutions.
What they want now, by putting the homeless and mentally deranged in the backyards of middleclass neighborhoods is for the homeowners and parents to become so outraged at having these often dangerous people (convicted sex offenders/pedophiles need not register if they simply claim “homeless”) that they demand the government raise taxes to construct new halfway homes for these people, homes, of course, that will be in these middleclass neighborhoods.
These are all Leftists, and their goal, one way or another, is to implement Marxism, which is controlling those who can be controlled and taking from them as much as can be taken before they revolt.
bookmark
Democrats and the ACLU, “freeing the crazy and disarming the sane.” A marriage made in hell if there ever was one.
Once again the MSM uses the term “massacre”.
32 people killed with GUNS = massacre
Muslim extremists flying jets full of fuel into office buildings and killing thousands of innocent people = “No Massacre”. Just a terrible tragedy, like a tsunami or something, that just happened one day and is a part of life.
OK, my mistake. I jumped the gun and just saw the word “massacre” again and took it for granted this was the MSM when it is actually a very good article. Not that “massacre” isn’t the right word for the VT killings. It was most certainly a massacre. I am just still furious at the MSM for downplaying the slaughter of 3000 innocent people by Muslim terrorists and they NEVER EVER labeled that a massacre.
Hey, I’m glad to see that this is news/activism and not some musings from a blog.
lol.
The mods are doing a helluva job. /s
Anyone remember Larry Hogue, the “Wild Man of 96th Street?”
This mental case/coke addict would terrorize passersby on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and cops arrested him dozens of times. Each time, he would spend a night or two in jail, and by the time he went before the judge to be arraigned, he was sober/medicated enough that he didn’t look to the Rat judge to be an “imminent” threat, so he was released right back out on the streets.
Even 60 Minutes was outraged by this (probably because either a correspondent or a producer lived nearby - NIMBY, dontcha know?).
Probably not U.S. college kids, but don't be surprised to see them adorning dirtbags on the streets of Peshawar.
And then made it impossible to get them off a college campus, even when their classmates are afraid to be in the same classroom with them. There are specific provisions of specific laws that kept Cho on VT's campus after one of the most left-wing profs in the place refused to let him continue in her class. Those specific laws/provisions need to be revised or wiped right off the books.
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