MORE MADNESS

Yesterday I wrote that I would respond to all of the columns being written about the Arizona shootings by reading them and discarding what I found useless. Alas, I am so sickened by the politicization of the tragedy that I cannot even bring myself to reading even a small portion of what is being written. If you want to read about why the "climate of hate" is responsible for the tragedy, why Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are at fault, why guns are the real problem, etc., you can go to RealClearPolitics or Instapundit or The New York Times, the editorial pages of The Washington Post, the Drudge Report and the like to find all that you can handle.

As for me, I am convinced that the elephant in the living room on this latest mass murder is the issue of mental illness. While it is true that the vast majority of mentally ill people are not dangerous (at least to others), it is also true that it only takes a small minority to create a good deal of mayhem. Responding to the abuses that resulted from an under-funded system of state mental hospitals in the first half of the 20th Century, policymakers decided it would be better to de-institutionalize the severely mentally ill and allow them to be treated in their communities to better integrate them into society. So, we closed many of the mental hospitals (which also saved money). The problem? We never built the required infrastructure to handle the people once served (however poorly) by those hospitals. Today, we find these people sleeping on the streets, living in shelters, or being cared for by their own families (which is often an expensive, debilitating and frustrating process, usually leading to family members giving up, resulting in homelessness for the mentally ill).

I hate to be a cynic about this, but I do not expect any action on this problem, even if more people become convinced, as I have, that it is the real problem. It is just too politically useful for liberals to blame these kinds of things on the rhetoric of the right or the lack of adequate gun control, rather than on our failure to create an effective infrastructure to identify and treat the severely mentally ill among us.

Mona Charen believes the contemptible opportunists on the left are obscuring the real problem, which is the failure to deal with mental illness.

Here is another column with specific recommendations on how to reform our current infrastructure regarding mental illness.

This blogger is trying to get a book published on the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill in the latter half of the 20th Century, and he has some thoughts on the issue.