2011-02-14

Stigmatizing Mental Illness

What bothers me about any type of prohibition (gun being the latest and marijuana the dumbest) is the utter lack of real thinking that goes into it. It seems we like to delude and fool ourselves with illusions than actually solve a problem. As if alcohol prohibition isn't enough of an air tight example of the folly of such nonsense. Criminalize something and you push it undergroung and then you end up arresting all sorts of people who pose no real threat to society.

Taxes is another measure we seem to believe achieves specific stated goals. They rarely do. Got a problem with the environment? Tax somerhing. Got a problem with obesity? Tax something. And so on.

When you think of it, there's no stopping how far we can prohibit things; all at the expense of personal liberty of course. Is there any other way?

It doesn't take a genius to figure out it's an inefficient way to solve problems.

From Psychiatry Online:

“...They are lumping people who have received mental health care in with criminals,” said Steven Hoge, M.D., director of the Division of Forensic Psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York and a member of APA's Council on Psychiatry and Law.


“...There is no simple answer” when searching for ways to prevent gun violence, said Howard Zonana, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and a clinical adjunct professor of law at Yale University. “It needs multiple approaches.”

All we do is stigmatize.

That's the misguided approach we cling on to now, for what, 60 years?

What really gets my Calabrese goat is in cases where people defend their property because the cops were nowhere to be seen, say in a riot, with guns they're the ones who get arrested.

How is that justice? In what planet do you live to think this is right?

Right.

It's all about the illusion of doing something. Anything.

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