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Thursday, December 08, 2005On the airline shooting:I haven't found a lot of details on this one, but there's one area of the story where I have fairly good knowledge: I know what it's like dealing with someone with bipolar, both on and off of medication. On is better. It is true that those with milder cases can take themselves off of medication over time. But this requires both the self-knowledge to recognize what's going on before things get out of hand and an inner circle to help put on the breaks and get the person to treatment if necessary. Bipolars don't typically take themselves off medication because life's gotten normal enough that cognitive behavioral therapy and carefully practiced self-awareness can substitute; they do so because the current meds aren't working well enough. From the sounds of it, this gentleman was a walking time bomb, even if there was no bomb in his satchel. There are those who will rush to judge the air marshall. Others will judge this gentleman. The real judgment, though, is on a society where mental illness is treated as special - far more debilitating than, say, the common cold, it's also far more likely to go untreated, as even those with insurance face no end of hassles getting reimbursement for services many don't believe in. We all know a pompous ass or two who never gets a cold and mocks as weak, ridiculous or sniveling those who get the sniffles and go to the doctor. Never having experienced mental illness, this is the approach a lot of the populace takes to those who, sadly, have messed up brain chemistry. And between the Tom Cruise/Scientology types and the Christian kooks who think demon possession and serotonin imbalances are the same thing, things are only slowly getting easier for those whose brain chemistry doesn't balance out quite right. The killer, of course, is that most of the truly mentally unstable can't even get it together enough to obtain the lousy treatment too often on offer. And they're too far off tilt to appreciate the more subtle adjustments medication gradually brings. In such circumstances, barriers to getting medication are the last thing that's needed. Better to have barriers to leaving the house before you take your pills. But we don't do that. Where does that leave us? A man was acting dangerously in a crowded public place - an air terminal - and the air marshall did the right thing in neutralizing him to protect the many others in the vicinity. A man with a mental illness and his wife were endeavoring to live a normal life, or so it seems, and that, too, is right. But something broke down in the middle, making the man a threat to himself. Was this suicide by cop? A fit of paronoia badly understood? Or something else? We'll never know. Let's hope that somewhere down the road, the stigma of mental illness will finally fade away enough that the mentally ill come into our consciousness is in their testimony to how far they've come, not news reports about poor souls gone astray in a society that neither acknowledges their plight nor offers much in the way of help except to those whose behavior has gone off the deep end, becoming both ugly and dangerous. We can do better. 
posted by gbarto at 4:53 PM |
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