The numbers of people labeled seriously mentally ill have been steadily rising since the turn of the century. According to the findings of Robert Whitaker, investigative medical journalist and author of the book, Mad In America, the facts are as follows. By 1903, 1 out of 500 people in the USA were labeled seriously mentally ill, by 1955, this percentage had risen to 1 out of 300 people; by 1987, it was 1 out of every 75 people; and today, it is close to 1 out of 50 people.
Somebody once said regarding the state hospital system, “If you give them more beds, they will fill them.” Well, with deinstitutionalization you don’t need beds. Once there were approaching 3000 people in the nearby state mental hospital, now that number is down to 250 people. Where are the remaining 2750 people? They are, by and large, being served by the communities where they reside. They are a relatively invisible population that hasn’t stopped growing, but they are there.
The Virginia General Assembly just passed laws lowering the standard for civil commitment. Why? Our legislator’s were reacting (Yes, reacting.) to the tragedy at Virginia Tech. Seung Hui Cho killed 31 students at Virginia Tech before turning his gun on himself. Seung Hui Cho, if he had been caught before killing himself, could not have used the mental illness excuse effectively to escape the death penalty. Not having a live body to hold accountable for the killings, our state legislature, aided and abetted by the Virginia Supreme Court’s Commission on Mental Health Reform and the Governors Panel on the V-Tech tragedy, decided they had to make a scapegoat for Cho’s crimes (Get it!) out of people in the state’s mental health system.
Lowering the standard of civil commitment in this state, the reasoning runs, we will be able to catch the next Cho before he commits his crimes. Alright, maybe we will, and maybe we won’t. You might have as much luck deciding such a matter by flipping a coin over it. If we didn’t get Cho, it must be too difficult to lock up crazy people. Uh huh, and there aren’t innocent people in the federal penitentiary system either. One thing is certain though, there will be more people labeled chronically mentally ill in the mental health system in Virginia in the future than there had been in the past.
Getting more people into the mental health system is not operating on a recovery model of mental health treatment. If we were operating on a recovery model of treatment, we would be trying to get people out of the mental health system. The more people there are in the mental health system, the more indicative that fact is of some failure of that mental health system. When people leave the mental health system, they are recovering; when people don’t leave the mental health system, they aren’t recovering. Our politicians have gotten this matter wrong, and the thrust of their recent legislation can only come back to haunt us all.
