Mental Illness and Mass Murder
How many more tragedies like the Tucson shootings will we have to watch before we start facing the harsh truth?
January 10, 2011 - by Clayton E. Cramer
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For the last three years, I’ve been trying to find a publisher for a book about the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and the destructive effects on our society that it has caused. I keep getting told that no one is interested in the topic. The tragedy in Tucson on Saturday — like dozens of other such incidents over the last three decades involving mentally ill persons who made headlines — is the reason that people should be interested. Watching the YouTube videos the shooter made and reading news accounts of his odd behavior leaves no doubt in my mind that the final diagnosis will be paranoid schizophrenia. (I have an older brother who suffered a schizophrenic breakdown in the 1970s. He has never recovered.)
When I was young, random acts of mass murder were shocking. In 1966, Charles Whitman went to the top of a building at the University of Texas and methodically murdered 13 people with a rifle. Such crimes were largely unthinkable until 1984, when James Huberty went into a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California, and murdered 19 people with a shotgun and an Uzi.
We are not shocked anymore. We are saddened — but the days when gun control advocates could dance in the blood of victims to get another useless gun control law passed are over. Americans are now used to this — and that is the biggest tragedy of all. We just accept this, and don’t ask, “What’s causing this? Can we fix it?”
It is not just Americans who are sitting on the sidelines wondering what happened. In spite of much more restrictive gun control laws in Europe, they have a lot of these mass murders over there also. In Finland. In Germany. In Britain. Of course, since these countries have somewhat restrictive to very restrictive gun control laws, the correct response to laws that did not work is … more of the same.
What changed? Our mental health system is what changed — a movement towards emptying out mental hospitals and making it difficult to commit someone against his will. This is called deinstitutionalization. This is an idea so theoretically elegant that it has been taking place everywhere. In America. In Canada. In Britain. In Finland (which has experienced one of the most rapid movements towards deinstitutionalization in the Western world). And probably in those other European countries as well.
In 1950, a person who was behaving oddly stood a good chance of being hospitalized. It might be for observation for a few days or a few weeks. If the doctors decided that this person was mentally ill, they would be committed, perhaps for a few months, perhaps longer. Hospital space was always at a premium, so generally, if someone was kept, there was a reason for it. The notion that large numbers of sane people were kept for no reason just has not survived my research efforts.
I will not claim that the public mental hospitals back then were wonderful places. They were chronically underfunded from the 1930s through the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, conditions in some were the shame of civilized people everywhere. (Ken Kesey wrote the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest after taking LSD and going to work at a mental hospital, and the film by that name is not a documentary.) But it did mean that many people who were mentally ill were either locked up (where they did not have access to guns, knives, or gasoline) or at least not sleeping on a park bench, catching pneumonia.
Let me tell you a story. In the late 1990s, a rather strange character showed up at the church we attended in Rohnert Park, California. Jim had been sleeping in the fields on the edge of town with his dog, getting around by bicycle with a little trailer for the pooch. He carried an impressive wad of cash, the fruits of a $600 a month Social Security disability check — and no rent to pay. Our pastor had worked in a homeless shelter, but this man did not quite fit the mold, so he asked me to talk to Jim.
Jim told a story of governmental oppression that for the first few minutes, while far-fetched, was not utterly impossible. His kids had been taken from him. His wife was locked up in a mental hospital. It was all a vast conspiracy! The more we talked, however, the more apparent it was that his thought processes, while not completely chaotic, were scattered and confused. Then he showed me the paperwork that had taken away his children. Jim was so confused that he did not realize what it showed.
Jim’s wife had been committed to a mental hospital, apparently because she had physically abused their children, and been found not guilty by reason of insanity. After her hospitalization, Jim had been showing pornographic films to his five year old and his three year old, then molesting them. Jim’s parental rights had been permanently terminated by court order.
Why didn’t the district attorney prosecute Jim? The documents provided no information, but my guess is that the prosecutor realized that a trial would require two small children to testify about sexual abuse by their father — having already lost their mother to mental illness. Under the best of conditions, this would have been a hard case to win in court, and it would certainly have been traumatic for the children.
In 1950, Jim’s mental illness would very likely have led to a commitment to a state mental hospital for the criminally insane. A judge would certainly have committed Jim based on the testimony of a psychiatrist and the evidence of even a few minutes of conversation. Not today. Instead, Jim wandered the streets, telling his tale of woe. The best that we could hope for is that his mentally disordered thinking would be obvious enough to prevent anyone else from putting their children at risk.
As I said, I’ve written a book about the subject. I knew that there were a lot of mentally ill mass murderers out there — but even I was shocked at the dozens of examples that my research unearthed over the last three decades. People like Larry Gene Ashbrook, a mentally ill person who gave plenty of warning. He wrote letters to local papers that “referred to encounters with the CIA, psychological warfare, assaults by co-workers and being drugged by police.” His strange behavior brought him to the attention of the police — who were helpless to take action, until Ashbrook murdered seven people in a Fort Worth church in 1999.
Or Russell Eugene Weston Jr., who was the gold standard of violent mental illness. After he shot two police officers at the U.S. Capitol in 1999, he explained that it was to stop the epidemic of Black Heva, a disease spread by the cannibals that were feeding on corpses — all part of an elaborate government conspiracy that Weston was going to stop. Weston, too, had previous mental health problems that were recognized — but he could not be held, in spite of his obvious dangerousness at least to himself, and probably to others.
I could give you a complete list of mass murderers who were recognized by family and friends as mentally ill and who refused treatment. Authorities were helpless to hospitalize them because of our wonderfully beautiful but completely absurd theories of civil liberties. This list would run on for very many pages.
How many more of these tragedies do we have to watch before we say, “Wow! Great theory! It didn’t work. Let’s reconsider this matter.” I’m afraid it is going to be a lot more tragedies before we start facing the harsh truth.
Clayton E. Cramer is a software engineer and historian. His sixth book, Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie (Nelson Current, 2006), is available in bookstores. His web site is www.claytoncramer.com.
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Forgotten Man
I agree the mental health system has changed. You could reasonably ask who is irrational? Judges and lawyers or mental patients? I would say it is the legal system. How can you expect a person with fairly serious mental problem to take medications on a regular basis? A fairly large percentage of homeless people should probably be in a hospital. Many of them prefer to self medicate with street drugs or booze. It is not irrational to keep a mentally sick person in a hospital against that person’s will. Why? Because a mentally ill person be definition cannot make a rational decision.
I don’t want to comment on this current situation because there has been more noise than fact and more emotional hand wringing that ration though already.
January 10, 2011 - 6:35 am Link to this Comment | Reply
2. 2. Old Guy
This happened within a mile of my home in 98. A guy whose family had tried to have committed got on a bus with a bucket of gasoline and then poured it on a couple he didn’t know and then set them on fire. They were burned horrifically, and everyone else on the bus was injured. The toll was not higher because few people ride the bus.
surroundedbyreality.com
I am sure there are a load of similar stories.
Progressive compassion in action.
January 10, 2011 - 6:36 am Link to this Comment | Reply
3. 3. Libertyship46
I keep hearing all of these interviews on TV on how crazy this shooter was and how strange he behaved. Yet nobody did anything about it, he was left alone in our society, AND he was able to purchase a gun without any problem. People today seem to be afraid of so many mentally unbalanced people, yet we do nothing about it and say nothing about it. I get worried this will only get worse, because more of these nuts will want their 15 minutes of fame by shooting some public figure or a large group of people. Same with the Virginia Tech Killer. He seemed clearly unbalanced to the other people in school, yet nobody did anything about it. But he wanted to go out with a “bang,” and he sure did. Perhaps Michelle Obama should spend more time arguing for more funds for the mentally ill, rather than rant on about obesity. As far as I can tell, a hamburger never shot and killed six people and wounded twelve others.
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January 10, 2011 - 7:01 am Link to this Comment | Reply
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5. 5. Robin Roberts
Libertyship46, without the commitment judgment, there is no legal way to ban a firearm purchase. That’s in part what Clayton is discussing.
January 10, 2011 - 7:09 am Link to this Comment | Reply
o Libertyship46
But that was my point, more of these people should be committed but are not. Most of the times we see them, we hear them, and they don’t even hide their strange behavior, yet nobody does anything about it. Our laws now make it even harder to get these people into an institution, not that the institutions are that great either. Had some more people sworn out a complaint against this guy, or had the teachers in college officially notified authorities that he seemed dangerous, maybe somebody would have done something about it. But, with litigation being what it is today, could you imagine the law suits that would take place if you tried to have someone committed and they were, in fact, sane? Maybe that’s why we should be spending more time and money on the subject of mental illness, rather than how many cupcakes kids are eating.
January 10, 2011 - 7:52 am Link to this Comment | Reply
6. 6. Carolyn
My husband worked in the prosecutors office and was on call for off hour warrants. The police called numerous times about a mental ill man whom they found walking out on the express way and they had arrest him and bring him to the psych hospital for admission. At that time all they need was for him to be a danger to himself or someone else for admission. The Dr kept saying he was fine and would release him and he would go right back to the express way. My husband told the police to take him back to the hospital and handcuff him to a door and leave.
As a student nurse 40 years ago while in a training program at a local mental hospital there were two psychiatrists that committed suicide over a six week peroid, children in the adult wards andI could go on and on but basically there is no mental health system left and what is there is a mess as the lunatics are running the asylum.
January 10, 2011 - 7:09 am Link to this Comment | Reply
7. 7. Larsky
Well I only disagree on one point with regard to this article. I work in the legal profession, I am a surety agent and bounty hunter. I assure you that many of the mentally ill are still institutionalized. Only today, we call it prison. And let me tell you from first hand experience, the mentally ill are treated horrifically by both law enforcement and their fellow inmates.
But at least the progressives can feel good and after all that is what is important.
Thanks
January 10, 2011 - 7:26 am Link to this Comment | Reply
o Clayton E. Cramer
You are correct that many are now in prisons, not hospitals–although only after they have committed very serious crimes. The book I’ve written references Bernard Harcourt’s work that demonstrates that total institutionalization rate (prison plus mental hospitals) correlates extremely well with murder rates for the period 1928-2000. As mental hospitals were emptied, murder rates rose. As prison populations rose, murder rates fell.
Prisons are not only more brutal to the mentally ill than mental hospitals, they are also more expensive.
It was not just progressives responsible for this disaster. Lots of good intentioned people, across the political spectrum, were lured in by this beautiful theory.
January 10, 2011
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