‘Ugh’ anti-stigma efforts are only making mental health worse

“It is time to end all forms of stigma and discrimination against people with mental health problems.” editorial The prestigious British medical journal The Lancet Earlier this month, in a special issue on the subject.

Indeed, efforts to avoid stigma and discrimination against people with mental illness have been ongoing in the criminal justice system for decades. Consider the following events: In 2021, police officers in New York arrested 19-year-old Franklin Mesa, who suffered from schizophrenia, after he punched someone twice. Mesa was liberated. Also in 2021, Marshall Simon, a mentally ill homeless man, was released after serving a four-year term for armed robbery. Then in March of this year, a Washington state judge released John Cody Hart from a local jail despite an appeal by local prosecutors, who said“Society does not need someone suffering from untreated mental illness to commit serious violent crimes without provocation.”

But what happened next in each of the above cases challenged The Lancet Controversy that stigma and discrimination are “worse than the situation” In July, Mesa allegedly stabbed 35-year-old Nathaniel Rivers to death in front of his wife. In January, Simon pushed 40-year-old Michelle Go onto subway tracks, killing her instantly. And earlier this month, Hart shoots two innkeepers After they confront him stealing from other guests at point-blank range.

Murders by these mentally ill people undermine The Lancet’s central contention that stigma and discrimination against the mentally ill is “worse than the situation”. Few would argue that the situation is worse than murder.

Without question, people with mental illness deserve our sympathy. Have serious mental illness disable, preventing people from engaging in regular work or family life. But, according to The Journal of the American Medical Association, the mentally ill also “have a significantly increased likelihood of having a history of violence.” Drug users are the most dangerous. Hart, for example, is a retired Army veteran who was diagnosis After jabbing his thumb in the eye of a man with schizophrenia and marijuana addiction that he may have blinded him for life.

when The Lancet report can encourage empathy, research on this topic is clear. “We have to try to prevent the unexpected,” Comment Jeffrey W. Swanson, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University. or, as clothes “A review of these data shows that the link between mental illness and violence is clearly relevant…this link should not be minimized or ignored,” the researchers wrote.

Yet The Lancet did just that. Why? Because The Lancet is, in a word, awake. And the Lancet is not alone.

Indeed, the publication is following in the footsteps of radical left groups like the ACLU, which decades ago fought for legislation to severely limit the powers of family members and police to treat mentally ill people. Instead of reforming mental hospitals, the Left shut them down. Instead of helping family members access much-needed medical care, the ACLU has fought to allow the mentally ill to become homeless on the streets where they are a danger to themselves and others.

“I remember pleading with someone at the hospital, ‘Let him be,’” Simon’s sister told The Post earlier this year“Because once he got out, he didn’t want to take the drugs, and it was the drugs that kept him going.”

Today, it is those psychiatrists who are stigmatized. “I feel the stigma every day as a psychiatrist,” said One in 2016. “There is no anti-cardiology movement trying to stamp out cardiology. And there is no anti-oncology movement trying to ban cancer treatment. But there is a very violent anti-psychiatry movement that claims there is no such thing as mental illness and wants to eradicate psychiatry.”

Still, it’s not like the anti-psychiatry movement freeing “people with lived experience of mental health conditions,” in the politically correct language of The Lancet. It just moved them to prisons and jails. Consider the consequences of Mesa, Simon, and Hart. All will likely end up in prison or in a hospital for the criminally insane—perhaps for the rest of their lives.

Currently, people with mental illness are 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized. At the same time, 120,000 mentally ill people approx Living on the streets of the United States. In 2012, the last time an estimate was made, 35,000 were in state hospitals, while an estimated 356,000 with serious mental illness were in jails and state prisons at any given time.

With The Lancet Report, the anti-psychiatry movement has moved from denying the reality of mental illness to denying that there is anything wrong with the condition. As a result, efforts to denigrate mental illness have in fact become the opposite: dehumanizing both people with mental illness and their victims.

Indeed, society has long stigmatized diseases such as leprosy for social, public health and safety reasons. And mental health can be one such factor. It is never appropriate to stigmatize it though people With a mental illness, we should be stigmatized unrefined Mental illness, which is dangerous and destructive to the people who suffer from it, and awake medical practice to allow it.

This should also hold for the criminal justice system. Justices should de-stigmatize mental illness and require recovery – or at least treatment – ​​before violent, mentally ill, and addicted people are allowed back into society. Notably, none of the judges overseeing the Mesa, Simon, or Hart cases did this.

The Lancet should revise its special issue. Because of stigma and discrimination to be able to Worse than disease, it’s true. But they are never worse than murder.