Psychosis

Aaron Alexis

Paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disease are major psychotic disorders. They are forms of what used to be generally called "insanity". People who were genetically cursed with these disorders comprised a large proportion of the population of state hospitals in the United States before those institutions were taken apart by politicians for financial, not honest medical, reasons. The government, aided by Hollywood, successfully manipulated the public consciousness into believing that residential hospitals for the mentally ill were universally evil and dangerous. This was and still is absurd. The real reasons for their demise were societal denial and expense to the taxpayer.

Some state institutions were indeed badly managed. They were generally underfunded by legislators who would rather ignore mental illness than acknowledge its presence, especially in their own families. Courageous staff members often made due with very little to provide a relatively safe haven for dysfunctional psychotic patients, whose mental illnesses were unresponsive to medications alone. These aides and nurses are unsung heroes, who often risked their own lives to work with very disturbed human beings for very low pay. Hollywood stigmatized them relentlessly by exploiting paranoid images of sadistic nurses and no-neck orderlies. 

The path from the dismantling of the state hospitals to now has been shameful. Rather than fulfilling the ideal presented by Reaganite "reformers" of multiple clean well-managed halfway houses and in-community housing for the chronically mentally ill we have hordes of homeless, self-medicating drug addicts and alcoholics on our urban streets. Our prisons, a growing profitable industry, are functioning as mental hospitals. Psychotics and those with personality disorders in poor communities are not treated early in adolescence or young adulthood. There is no hospital or residence where they can escape pathological families of origin, from which they have genetically and environmentally inherited their disease. Gangs and the street are their escape routes. 

Alcohol, marijuana and heroin have become the self-medication of the untreated as they wander the streets. Government favors funding methadone clinics and shelters over rehabs and mental hospitals. Methadone providers, like prisons, are a growing industry with urban clinics popping up like MacDonald's franchises. Yesterday I witnessed six people, all stumbling from methadone doses, trying to pile into a car at my supermarket parking lot. There is a private methadone clinic around the corner. It draws clients from all over Eastern Massachusetts. I speculate their security measures and evaluation practices are very loose. The addict grapevine has led to a flood of methadone addicts coming on all forms of transport to this particular clinic. Even driving here and driving home stoned!

The shock voiced in media at the recent shooting at a Navy installation in Washington on the part of law enforcement or the psychiatric establishment is disgustingly disingenuous. Aaron Alexis had been displaying classic symptoms of mental illness in the Navy and since his discharge. Police had dealt with him on several occasions, during which his mental dysfunction should have been glaringly obvious. And what were they to do with him? The jails and prisons are overwhelmed with mentally ill inmates. While the prison industry is burgeoning, mentally ill inmates eat away at profits. I would speculate that police officers are discouraged by superiors from arresting and detaining mentally ill suspects. 

A society which denies its genetic mental illnesses is due for painful wake-up calls by incidents of violence. Citizens who supported the dismantling of mental health services in every community across the U.S. with the ballots they have cast cannot claim to be innocent victims when these situations occur. Citizens who support politicians who will not pass gun-control legislation cannot claim to be innocent victims. Those who do choose to see themselves as innocent victims are deluded. Delusions are common symptoms of  psychotic disorders.