A deadly combination
Guns and Mental Illness
By JOE NOCERA, NYT
Many years ago, when I was a young reporter at Texas Monthly magazine, I spent the better part of six months in the company of a man who suffered from schizophrenia. His name was Fred Thomas; he was 23 years old; and he had been steadily deteriorating since high school, which is when most men first show symptoms of the disease.
I watched Fred as he was shuttled in and out of the state hospital in Austin, Tex. — one of the few that had not been closed down by the mid-1980s — where he was wildly overmedicated, and then released to either his mother’s home, which was invariably disastrous, or a halfway house ill equipped to help someone as delusional as he was.
I learned about the group homes that had sprung up after the closure of the mental hospitals. They were so gruesome that one outplacement worker told me she had never been to one “because I don’t want to know where I am sending them.” I spent time at a homeless shelter that had become, in effect, a mental institution without doctors or aides. Ultimately, the article I wrote was about how the “deinstitutionalization movement” of the 1960s and early 1970s — a movement prompted by the same liberal impulses that gave us civil rights and women’s rights — had become a national disgrace.
What spurs this recollection are two things. The first is Nina Bernstein’s powerful report in The Times this week about the plight of the mentally ill in New York. Although the article was pegged to the loss of services after Hurricane Sandy, in truth, Sandy only exacerbated a situation that was already terrible. With the mentally ill rarely institutionalized for any length of time — on the theory that their lives will be better if they are not confined in a hospital — other institutions have sprung up to take their place.
(More here.)
Many years ago, when I was a young reporter at Texas Monthly magazine, I spent the better part of six months in the company of a man who suffered from schizophrenia. His name was Fred Thomas; he was 23 years old; and he had been steadily deteriorating since high school, which is when most men first show symptoms of the disease.
I watched Fred as he was shuttled in and out of the state hospital in Austin, Tex. — one of the few that had not been closed down by the mid-1980s — where he was wildly overmedicated, and then released to either his mother’s home, which was invariably disastrous, or a halfway house ill equipped to help someone as delusional as he was.
I learned about the group homes that had sprung up after the closure of the mental hospitals. They were so gruesome that one outplacement worker told me she had never been to one “because I don’t want to know where I am sending them.” I spent time at a homeless shelter that had become, in effect, a mental institution without doctors or aides. Ultimately, the article I wrote was about how the “deinstitutionalization movement” of the 1960s and early 1970s — a movement prompted by the same liberal impulses that gave us civil rights and women’s rights — had become a national disgrace.
What spurs this recollection are two things. The first is Nina Bernstein’s powerful report in The Times this week about the plight of the mentally ill in New York. Although the article was pegged to the loss of services after Hurricane Sandy, in truth, Sandy only exacerbated a situation that was already terrible. With the mentally ill rarely institutionalized for any length of time — on the theory that their lives will be better if they are not confined in a hospital — other institutions have sprung up to take their place.
(More here.)
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