Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)

Seung-hui Cho clearly was mentally incapacitated. He clearly was a menace to society and to himself, but who could have predicted that he would respond to his situation in the way he did? Even Cho's roommate was shocked and surprised by what transpired. So how do we decide who to haul away in handcuffs? And who should make those decisions?

In view of the recent Virginia Tech massacre, it is easy to say that a mentally ill person should simply be locked up until his or her symptoms abate, but the fact is that treating mental illnesses rarely resolves a person's problems quickly. Instead, this is usually a long and time-consuming process that requires a fair amount of money and patience. Many people with a mental illness lack one or more of these resources, so they suffer, and their loved ones suffer along with them.

Speaking from experience, when faced with the draconian controls imposed by the mental health establishment, it is easy for a person to view it as something less than helpful. Worse, it is traumatic to be hauled away to a mental health hospital in handcuffs, as Cho was -- and is an event that often negatively colors a person's interactions with the mental health establishment for the remainder of their lives.

Additionally, even under the best of circumstances, finding the correct psychiatric medications is more of an art than a science, requiring many many months, sometimes years, of experimentation with a wide array of medications. Further, many psychiatric medications cause a wide variety of unpleasant side effects, such as physical illnesses and extreme weight gain, that make some patients unwilling to take them at all. Others refuse to take medications because of the tremendous expense involved, or the perception that the medications are not alleviating the symptoms of mental illness. Added to these factors is the social stigma of mental illness that results in the loss of jobs, or rejection by loved ones or family, and the resulting social isolation, and you can see a compelling argument for ignoring the symptoms of mental illness until it is too late.

I think the best way to deal with such situations is to teach the public the warning signs preceding an impending psychological collapse, and we need to enact laws that allow the public to protect themselves before such a collapse occurs. However, the public has a responsibility to treat mental health issues as medical problems, rather than as a legal problem, and to provide mental health treatment to those who cannot afford it themselves so the sufferer can receive treatment before a devastating psychological collapse occurs -- a breakdown that can result in that person being forcibly removed from their social and professional lives.

Unfortunately, far too often, a diagnosis of a mental illness is a weapon used by society to permanently shun the sufferer or to reduce that person to a mere shadow of what she or he once was, personally, socially, professionally. To be fair and just, society must ensure that once treated, a mentally ill person is allowed to make a full return to society, to their work and families, without suffering social stigma -- something that I think is sorely lacking in today's blame-the-victim society.

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