Treating Insanity as DANGER, not Transgression

In 1995, when my Atypical M.S. became symptomatic I learned more about the disability process in the U.S. than I ever wanted to know. I had to fight for my benefits with little energy or support. I had to fight for a diagnosis and to prove empirically what my body was screaming to me.

To this day, I am fighting for E.R.I.S.A. reform and disability fairness against one of the biggest lobbies in Washington, the Health Insurance Lobby - which has a stranglehood on the benefits & welfare of too many people in the U.S. who paid their premiums in good faith. In light of the murder of my beloved counselor, Kathryn Faughey, I remain undeterred - and in fact, reinvigorated.

Those of you who still work, go ask for a copy of your policy from your Benefits Office. No, not the copy of the sanitized handbook they give you - a copy of the ACTUAL policy signed between your employer and their insurer. Don't stop asking until you get it - you are entitled by law to see it.

Now ask yourself these questions:

Did you know that most disability policies will stop paying your disability after 18 months if you are diagnosed with a MENTAL ILLNESS? And your job could let you go leaving you with no health insurance?

Did you know your insurer has a right to send you for an Independent Medical Exam (IME) with their doctor (in my opinion - "medical whore") who could very well diagnose you as able to work but mentally ill thereby cutting off your benefits and causing you to spend your own money on doctors to refute this?

Did you know that Social Security Disability puts many many people under a Mental Illness heading when they have a physical disability that the government doesn't want to see or doesn't understand?

Did you know an incorrect diagnosis of mental illness stays in your record forever?

Did you know that some doctors prescribe psychotropic drugs and do not require the patient see a psychologist? Or even follow up to see if the patient is taking their medication?

Did you know that pain, illness and job stress can cause depression - not the other way around?

Did you know that untreated mental illness can cause permanent chemical changes in the brain and body?

Considering the legal, medical and social stigma around mental illness, was Dr. Faughey's murder an accident waiting to happen? Or possibly another big wake up call to rip the curtains off the mental illness phobia we have had in this country. In my small opinion, people like Dr. Faughey's murderer needed to be out of the general public mainstream. Why wasn't he? Why was he released from mental hospital after mental hospital? Why wasn't he put away? HOW did he keep getting out? WHO let him out?

In her memory - I plan to keep asking these questions.



Jewish scholars say:

Mental illness is taken very seriously within Talmudic and Halachic literature and is treated with the same seriousness as physical illness. (See Shabbat 50b and 128b)

It is certainly a mitzvah to visit those who are suffering from mental conditions just like one who is suffering from physical ailments.

Rabbi Ari Enkin -- Ramat Beit Shemesh, Israel

All that said, this article nicely sums up the Wake Up call the U.S. got regarding mental illness last April after the Virginia Tech tragedy and how we treat it. With my friend's murder, the latest school shooting, the Christmas-time mall and store shootings - it feels a good time to repost this. I have inserted some Jewish wisdom on this issue within the article:

Madness at Virginia Tech
By Rich Lowry

In early 21st-century America, what do you do when you encounter a severely mentally ill person? Anyone who lives in the city knows the answer to that question — you step around him on the sidewalk, you hope he doesn’t hassle you, and maybe you give him some money if he’s panhandling.

The authorities at Virginia Tech did their own version of this urban shuffle in their handling of Cho Seung-Hui. It’s obviously much easier to realize that someone is dangerously deranged after he has killed 32 people than when dealing with uncertain knowledge in an environment where any wrong (or even correct) move means a lawsuit.

But Virginia Tech often tiptoed around Cho’s mental disturbance.

Maimonides was both Rabbi and physician, in Egypt, some 800 years ago. He wrote that, when a doctor observes a mental problem, treatment of the psychiatric malady must take priority. - Rabbi Barry H. Block

When his “poetry” was read aloud in a class, it was so terrifying that at the next meeting of the class only seven of 70 students showed up. Cho was removed from that class, and another professor began to tutor him one-on-one, but only after establishing a secret code word with her assistant to signal when she should call security.

Another alarmed professor went to her dean with worries about Cho. She was told that nothing could be done, so he was simply placed off to the side of the seminar, where he said nothing and his disturbing writings weren’t read aloud. This is a microcosm of how we’ve handled many of the mentally ill during the great deinstitutionalization of the past 30 years, when they have been left to their own devices — and often to the streets or prison — rather than treated.

There are many reasons for this — the rise of psychotropic drugs, budget cuts, expanded conceptions of civil rights — but one intellectual current behind the trend was a moral disempowerment of sanity.

One of the most influential academics of the late 20th century, Michel Foucault, argued that attempts to label and treat madness were inherently arbitrary and repressive. Academia has been celebrating “transgression” ever since.

Any attempt to romanticize madness has an incontrovertible answer in Cho Seung-Hui. This is what madness truly is: lonely, painful, shattering, and potentially murderous.

After seeing the sick trail of misery left by such transgression, can we expend some of the same intellectual energy honoring wholesome normality?

Sadly, we are all too aware that we must also address mental illness as a matter of pikuah nefesh, saving lives, the highest mitzvah in Judaism. Each year, some 5000 young people, aged 15 to 24, commit suicide in America, with thousands more adults taking their lives. Suicide usually ranks first or second among causes of death of teens and young adults.

I know, too, that many among us face brain disease alone. Too often, people are ashamed of their ailments. Even more frequently, psychiatric patients correctly perceive that, if people know about their diagnoses, their mental illness will overshadow every interaction and define the way they are viewed in the community.

May our hearts be open, reaching out to our neighbors in the hour of deepest depression. May our minds be open, seeking to understand the person whose behavior has become difficult to comprehend. May our doors be open, even to the folks whose mental illnesses have made them most difficult to accept. Let us welcome them all in our congregation and community, with love and caring, with dignity and respect.

May we also join in the crusade of our Reform Movement. Let us insist that medical science seek a cure for schizophrenia, as well as cancer. Let us raise funds for research on depression and diabetes. Let us demand that health insurance cover bi-polar disorder as well as it protects us when we need heart surgery. Let us insist that our society�s safety net catch the poorest among us when they suffer from psychosis and when they are in an automobile accident. - - Rabbi Barry H. Block

Behind some of the plaints of Virginia Tech staff that nothing could be done about Cho, you can hear the undercurrent: Who were we to judge? Of course, if he had occasionally uttered racial slurs rather than frightening those around him with bizarre behavior, the full apparatus of administrative power at Virginia Tech would have been brought down on him.

But Virginia Tech also had to cope with an extremely strict state commitment law that requires that someone represent an “imminent danger” to himself or others before he can be compelled to seek treatment. A judge ruled in 2005 that Cho met this standard, but nothing much came of it (although he reportedly was on an antidepressant). Virginia hasn’t caught up to other states that have begun to recover from the excesses of deinstitutionalization and have made it easier to compel treatment.

According to an extensive survey in the New York Times a few years ago, about half of rampage killings are committed by mentally ill people, a much higher percentage than the roughly five percent that commit all murders. Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, president of the Virginia-based Treatment Advocacy Center, believes there has been a rise in such killings in the past 20 years, which coincides with the period when we have dumped many severely mental ill people out into society without treating them.

Let it be known: We embrace the mentally ill in our midst, they have been with us from the days of Abraham and Sarah, and even before them. Let us be clear: Mental illness is real illness. We expect our health insurance, and our government, to care for the mentally ill, as well as the physically infirm. Let our voices rise in prayer: We pray for healing of body, and we pray for healing of mind.- Rabbi Barry H. Block

There is, of course, a balance to be struck between civil liberties and treating the mentally ill. But that balance is now badly off-kilter. Cho Seung-Hui was basically abandoned to his private mental hell at Virginia Tech. While he hatched his lunatic and hateful plot, everyone tried to ignore the scary guy in class behind the sunglasses.

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