Why Did He Do It?
Hello all, Henry here. Lew Dobbs, the t.v. commentator said moments ago about the Virginia Tech killer: “we are still trying to figure out why he did it.
That, I think, is obvious: . He did it because he was mentally ill. This seems obvious, though perhaps it’s so difficult to believe that people feel the need to look for an easier to believe cause. If Dobbs wants to figure out why he was mentally ill then he needs to study psychology for 4 - 10 years and then he can write a book like many others, but the cause both simple and tragic.
The problem isn’t to figure out some kind of sociological understanding. The problem is that there is no longer a safe place for mentally ill people to be.
In the “good old days” mentally ill patients we kept on locked wards in area hospitals. With my old teacher Dr Maxwell Jones’s emphasis on patients rights and their rights to sort out their own lives, urban areas across the continent decided to close the old asylums and discharge people back to the community.
Many asylums were closed and for patients who need a safe long-term safe place to live, their safe place was gone. I lived through the emptying of one of those mental hospitals to the community. We had to take patients out to the community, introduce them to busses, streetlights, the speed of traffic, safe places to go and things to do. The patients themselves, instead of living in the centre of the city were largely shipped out miles away to facilities in the country, cut off from most of their old friends and cut off from the metro area.
This was largely done for two reasons. We were giving people a life outside in the community outside the locked doors. The second and by far most important reason, is that we were saying money. Essentially, these people became someone else’s problem. Real-estate was released for development and the accountants could happily increase their bottom line.
It seems, given events like what happened at Virginia Tech, that it would be better for some people to simply be kept in a place that is both safe for them, and for others.