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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rarebird who wrote (32558)	8/22/2000 6:26:45 AM
From: GROUND ZERO™	Respond to of 50167

OT - Hi Rarebird, How have you been... Those kinds of situations that you point out are very rare and do make for entertaining filmmaking... but in the real world of incarceration and criminal justice, there are facilities for individuals like that... I realize this is not what you're saying, but there are those that say if the offender is 'insane' that he/she should be excused from the act of wrongdoing... 'insane' is only a legal term used in court to mitigate the criminal circumstances... this is illogical, the offender should still be found guilt, however with mitigating circumstances of a validly diagnosed illness... being schizophrenic or whatever doesn't make it okay to commit criminal acts... there are numerous severely mentally ill people that do not commit any criminal acts... this may not be the proper forum for this, but the etiology of the current model for mental illness needs to be briefly introduced here... making allowances for mental illness is a throwback to the historic notion that people were not responsible for their actions because they were 'possessed by the devil'... but, this is not the year 1650, this is the year 2000 and we should know better... the devil has now been replaced with mental illness as if the individual is no longer responsible for his actions because he is now possessed by a mental disease (first thought to be a virus or bacteria early on, but this model has also been abandoned some years ago)... so therefore, if a drunk driver kills someone, people say 'oh, well he was drunk' as if being drunk made it less than homicide... rather, the fact that the driver was drunk at the time should aggravate the severity of the criminal act, not mitigate it..... long term progress in the treatment of mental illness has been delayed as a result of using the historic model of being possessed... numerous studies show that when more progressive treatments are applied, the individual (patient) responds more rapidly... I spent two years conducting studies at Chicago State Hospital in the back wards where those diagnosed as schizophrenic have been residing for an average of 25 years and even they became more responsive to appropriate social interactions when the old model of mental illness was abandoned for newer, more progressive therapeutic models and techniques..... GZ