The Case for Locking Up the Mentally Ill

Everyone around Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner knew he was dangerously disturbed. What if he'd been locked up before he picked up a gun?

“The only time we ever mention mental illness is to ‘fight the stigma,’” writes the Toronto Star’s Heather Mallick. “But the stigma is there for a reason,” namely that mentally ill people can be dangerous. The gist of her typically Mallickian meandering column is that these stigma-fighting efforts “have reduced our willingness to write frankly about genuine menace” and made it too difficult to single out potentially dangerous people and do things like expel them from classrooms. She believes that unless more is done to identify and deal with people like Jared Lee Loughner — whose unstable and dangerous behaviour was well-documented — before they commit their crimes, it is inevitable that “[m]ore politicians will be shot.”

In the National Post, Dr. David Gratzner goes a step further and advocates for the need to create laws to criminalize mental illness under certain circumstances. “Consider that a decade ago, California college student Laura Wilcox was shot dead by a paranoid man who had refused treatment for his mental illness,” he writes. “The public outcry helped lead to the passage of Laura’s Law, which authorizes court-ordered treatment for individuals with severe mental illness who meet specific criteria.” Unfortunately, according to Gratzner at least, the law is rarely enforced in California, and many other states don’t even have such laws on the books. He agrees with the Treatment Advocacy Centre, which “emphasizes the need for all states to have laws that enable court-ordered treatment for certain mentally ill.”

You can just imagine mental health advocates screaming with frustration at Mallick and Gratzner’s columns. After all, neither one of them acknowledges any potential problems with violating people’s rights on the sole basis of their court-determined mental state, or the negative effect that stigmatization can have on treating mental disease. Clearly this is a Pandora’s box. But if stricter legal control is going to be exercised on people with records of disturbing behaviour, the very first measure should surely be to ensure that they can’t buy automatic weapons and use them unleash their inner turmoil.