Americans like to think that they are enlightened as far as mental illness goes. They no longer keep crazy old Aunt Sally locked in the attic. People are encouraged all the time to seek mental health treatment. “Go for professional help” is code for get a shrink. People confess to taking Zoloft and other anti depressants like they are popping an aspirin. Some folks even discuss what their psychiatrists tell them as a conversation piece at cocktail parties. Is all this feel-good talk about our national mental health simply window dressing?
Yes and no. Actually, our treatment of mental illness is, if you will pardon the pun, schizophrenic. On the one hand, mental illness is treated like its just one of the conditions that affects the human body, like heart disease, TB, diabetes or chicken pox. Our HIPAA laws protect mental health conditions like any other disease, in fact often times more than other diseases.
Mental health issues, however, have a very dark underbelly. We are often punitive in our treatment of those being treated for mental problems. Often some of our trepidation about mental illness is well-founded in all too stark and shocking reality. Mass murders, employment terrorism, and yes, downing planes into the side of mountains all are caused by people suffering from mental illness.
Thus the conundrum. We are expected to treat mental illness like physical illness. It’s a disease. What is our reaction to be when a psychotic Virginia Tech student goes on a rampage and guns down over 30 people, just attending class and going about their daily business? Absolutely the warning signs were there. The very privacy laws that protected the shooter possibly allowed the thirty plus individuals who died to be shot in the first place. Cho’s records did not follow him from Fairfax Schools to Virginia Tech. Many people believe those records should have been part of Cho’s transcript.
In fact, it is hard to find a mass killing that isn’t related to mental illness. Sane people don’t gun down their fellow human beings, do they? So what happens to those who are identified as mentally ill? Here is the paradox again, biting reality right squarely in the ass. People seeking “help” also hide their disability from their employers and friends. For every Zoloft-taker who shares the most intimate details of their affliction, there are probably 10 people out there who are seeking treatment who carefully guard their condition because they don’t want to jeopardize their jobs. Some positions have clear restrictions for those with mental conditions being on the job. Jobs that involve public safety are perhaps the most unforgiving.
The feel-good public attitude about mental health treatment is simply veneer, for the most part and with many people. The reality is, those who admit to having conditions that require medication are often watched more closely. Some people are restricted from work. Some people hide their illness. Some people go undetected.
How do we become an enlightened, caring nation that encourages those suffering with both minor and severe mental illness while at the same time protect society from those whose mental illness causes them to go rogue and injure or scores of people? That is the conundrum. How we treat those with mental illness pretty much depends on their behavior…and our own attitude.
We have come a long way from locking strange Uncle John in the basement but we have a longer way to go still before Uncle John is absorbed into society and allowed to work. Somehow science, medicine and human attitude must get us to a point where people are not afraid to seek psychiatric treatment and society isn’t afraid of a mentally ill person going postal. Will there ever be such a point?
