Showing posts with label victims. Show all posts
Showing posts with label victims. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Why expecting 'meds' to keep people from doing bad things fails

I live in a HUD complex where quite a number of mental patients on disability reside so we are always hearing discussion of how this one and that one went off their meds and on a rampage. A great deal of blame is sent the way of the prescribers who have often been sued in our city as ultimately responsible for some terrible murders because they did not monitor their patients close enough and somehow keep them from going off their meds and committing some ghastly crimes.
Another such crime is in the paper today which galvanizes me finally to speak out. A teacher at a Catholic school around 62 did not come to work and when police were sent to check on her uncharacteristic silence, she was found dead and her undoubtedly mentally ill son was digging a grave size hole in the backyard quite openly. All too often this kind of crime is splashed across the front pages.
Another mentally ill man committed the crime of bludgeoning to death two little boys playing in the park who were the same age of his own two boys who were living in another state at the time. This was such a henious crime that it hit national headlines.
A settlement was given by the jury of 36 million dollars recently to a family that sued after a mentally ill man came and shot a young father and another man who were gathering carts to take into a shopping center. The prescribers were the ones who were going to have to cough up this settlement. I don't know how Value Options and other such providers keep functioning with such ruinous judgments by jurors frustrated with crime after crime like this. Value Options lost the contract they had with the county to care for their mentally ill, and another company had taken over when the mentally ill man went on the rampage and killed the two little boys.
But such settlements will not bring back life, and I am thinking that we as a society are expecting the impossible of pills. The mentally ill patient always has the option of not taking them. Aren't we avoiding another conclusion we might come to about a society that would expect pills which the patient may or may not take to stop the savage beast from emerging to kill.
Nobody ever talks about a society that does not hold its self in check from killing policies and then expects pills to do the job in others. That is just not rational thinking.
Too many times families become unable to control a member who has begun to exhibit violent tendencies. I think we are seeing the break down in these cases of a society that does not constantly present a good example of restraint to its most unstable members. We are raising people to kill. And we don't know why?
I believe our society is suffering from a serious case of mental illness that pills will not cure. Only recognizing the malady and taking the steps to rid ourselves from such thinking is the only thing that is going to stop our progress into more and more violence. These unstable people are not getting the example they need from birth.
I am reading that one in five young people now days gets diagnosed with a mental illness. That should be enough to tell us right there that is a big fallout from compromising on acts of violence. We delude ourselves at our own peril.
Once a person is on the rampage, nobody can stop the carnage. Somebody is going to get hurt. The power of the mind and good example of restraint is what I think keeps people from committing violence. Stability in the parent and in the society around them is what builds sanity. We are expecting way too much from pills.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

VI- Parents fail to respond appropriately to a pedofile hanging out with their teens--shot fired!

When my sister, a public health nurse, tried to do something about a pedofile who molested many underaged boys during his reign of terror, there was bad results and nothing essentially was done about charging him and sending him to prison as a serial pedofile. Victims had to testify who would not. Parents had to deal with the situation rationally. A building my sister owned was burned twice, and he had been suspected of arson some years before. He was a burgler as well. He was let out of jail once in a town around there by someone in authority who said he raped so many young prisoners, they let him out because they could not protect those in jail from him! He is not the only violent and frightening pedofile I have known. I charged one once for molesting my five year old daughter in an attack that only lasted long enough for him to try to make contact. He was furious because his government job was at stake. He did not lose it but we took him to court and my daughter testified. I did this as a way of making up for whatever protection I gave my molester at 5 by not reporting the crime. A highly dangerous pedofile is not easy to imprison and contain as he can be very cunning and smart as both of these pedofiles were. This will be the last video on sex offenders for a while, but I am sure their disturbing activities will cause me to have to return to the subject again. They just do not go away that easy.

Friday, December 5, 2008

III- Do we judge the victims of molestation?

If early molestation has anything to do with sexual orientation aren't we judging the victim and thus victimizing them again. I always had some sympathy for both my dad and my granddad, because I felt that they were both constrained from ever talking about what had happened to them on their journey through hazardous childhoods that may have determined the behavior of the men, even if married with children. I am sure both hoped that marriage might somehow cure them, but when it didn't society was incapable of wanting the truth let alone dealing with it with fairness. I knew very well from what happened with my male cousins on Grandpa's ranch that boys may have been regarded as sexual objects, not only on that ranch but others ranches that I knew about. Some ranch owners were of course completely normal and these problems did not arise among their children. I felt I got targeted when I was doing boys work, which caused me to think hard about what boys born into such circumstances had to contend with. My grandfather's dad was a sport, an alcoholic as well as a big property owner who made a fortune and lost it due to his vices. He expected a lot of his son who took care of the family the rest of his life after his father died relatively young.

Herrad

Blog Archive