Why the Virginia Tech Shooter Was Not Committed »

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  stephen-johnson

  April 23, 2007, 12:28 p.m.

  From the article:

  I was in graduate school, studying clinical psychology when they began shutting down the asylums. The place was California, the time was the early 1970s, and "they" were an unprecedented confederation of progressives, libertarians and fiscal conservatives.

  From the left marched battalions of self-styled mental health "liberation activists" steeped in the writings of Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Though he denied being opposed to his own profession, Laing's notion that madness could be a reasonable reaction to an unjust society, or even a vehicle for spiritual transformation, helped fuel the anti-psychiatry movement of the post Love-In era. The most radical of Laingians carried revisionism one step further: Not only wasn't psychosis a bad thing, it was evidence of a superior level of consciousness.
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  stephen-johnson

  April 23, 2007, 12:29 p.m.

  Con't

  The libertarians were fueled by Thomas Szasz, an iconoclastic psychiatrist who was, and remains, an outspoken foe of virtually every aspect of his chosen specialty. Hungarian-born in 1920, and witness to vicious state exploitation of medical practice by the Nazis and the communists, Dr. Szasz pushed an absolutist dogma of individual choice, finding ready converts among members of the Do-Your-Own-Thing generation. Though his early essays offered much-needed critiques of the Orwellian nightmares that can result when autocracy corrupts health care, Dr. Szasz devolved into something of a psychiatric Flat-Earther, insisting in the face of mounting contrary evidence that mental illness simply does not exist. Currently, he serves on a commission, cofounded with the Church of Scientology, that purports to investigate human rights violations perpetrated by mental health professionals.
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  lovelytxwoman

  April 23, 2007, 12:35 p.m.

  I remember this happening too! Being only school kid I remember only horrible conditions that were aired on TV. It makes us wonder if radical change is always a good thing! The closing of all those mental health institutions and now we have those same people homeless and wandering our streets! Even if they are not harmful to others,are they harmful to their own mental health?
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  ETproductions

  April 24, 2007, 1:09 a.m.

  State funded hospitals for the mentally ill were a nationwide reality in my youth. I never understood why, as we reportedly grew richer and richer, we could no longer afford to care for such people and had to turn them out onto the streets, only to then complain of the "homeless problem".

  Thanks, Stephen Johnson, fir some insight into why this happened.

  It's time we right this injustice.
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  Eagle_Eye

  April 25, 2007, 9:41 a.m.

  Closing the goverment run institutions was suppose to be humanitarin, what no one ever thought about was what would happen to these people. They were turned loose on the street if they had no family to take them in and that is when the American homeless became a much bigger problem since many were retarded and couldn't take care of themselves.

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