Lowry: What is "The Madness Lobby"?
Rich Lowry writes:
In his Tucson speech, President Barack Obama rightly said that “terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding.” Why that morning? Why Gabby Giffords? These and other questions can’t be answered, but at a more pedestrian level the Tucson massacre isn’t so mysterious: Someone displaying all the symptoms of untreated schizophrenia killed people.
This is not an extraordinarily rare or inexplicable occurrence. According to the psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, 4 million people in the United States have serious mental illnesses, and 1.8 million of them go untreated. Two hundred thousand are homeless, and 300,000 are in jail or prison. Tormented by depression or delusions, about 15 percent kill themselves, and they commit about 1,600 murders a year.
President Obama was too sweeping when he said we shouldn’t point fingers. Our ire should be directed at the mental-health “advocates,” federal bureaucrats, and crusading civil libertarians who fight to maintain a status quo that makes it hard to treat the mentally ill. They are the madness lobby.
They aren’t responsible for Jared Loughner or his crimes. They do deserve the blame for a system that willfully lets people fall through the cracks and pretends diseased minds can make rational decisions. At its best, this system is cruel in abandoning the ill to their suffering; in exceptional cases, it is reckless in leaving dangerous people to do harm to themselves or others. The madness lobby helps make the literally lunatic act of violence a routine part of the American landscape.
A group of “anti-psychiatrist” thinkers provided the philosophical impetus for emptying our mental institutions. Thomas Szasz, Michel Foucault, and others ably demonstrated the power of idiot ravings to increase the sum total of human misery. Szasz compared psychiatry to slavery, while idealistic lawyers who wanted to vindicate the civil rights of patients launched an assault on commitment laws.
In a combination of foolish budget-cutting and misconceived compassion (some of the institutions were indeed horrors), states began to dump people out of mental hospitals in the 1960s. In his book The Insanity Offense, Dr. Torrey documents how, as the numbers of mentally ill in institutions declined throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the numbers on the streets or in jails increased. For many of the mentally ill, deinstitutionalization was essentially a shuffle — from hospital to prison.
