Insights on why people 'snap' and kill (via CNN)
If the warning signs are strong, the person should be taken to a hospital’s emergency room, Raison said. Most ERs have the capacity to determine if someone is a danger to himself or others. In California, residents can call police to have someone evaluated, and then hospitalized if needed.
“You can’t hold people forever, but this is the best thing society has at this point,” Raison said.
Ah- that is such bullshit! Psychologists annoy me. In my mind, creating an arbitrary, pathological “illness label” does not provide a reason. It’s as if diganosing someone with a “psychosis” marks them as an inevitable biological anomaly, exempting us from the responsibility of examining the social reasons why violence occurs!!
I think violence and crime can be a lot like food poisoning. I suppose, if our water supply was infested with E. coli, that we could diagnose all the sick people with gastrointestinal diseases and spend millions on finding the best pharmaceutical cure. Now think about the torturous acts committed by US soldiers or the high amounts of crime in low-income urban areas: are these individuals rare psychotic anomalies, and should we dedicate our energies to surveillance & weeding them out? Should we expect that mental health is any less dependent on contextual factors than physical health? Perhaps examining the ways that injustice & dominance faciliate suffering would be a better use of time than arguing over the specifics of the 398283th personality disorder in the DSM.
