Mental Health and Moral Issues Raised by the Jared Loughner Murders; Are You Your Neighbor's Keeper?

your brother's keeper?

What would you do if a person acted "crazy" around you? Do privacy rights supersede "preemptive community safety" rights? that is, when are we to--when would YOU-- step in and act--even against another's will--when behavior seems too far outside the norm or frightening?
How seriously would You push the authorities to act?

On the one hand,
 Thomas Szasz felt folks should live and let live---and that there was really no such thing as Mental Illness : [from Wiki--"Mental illness" is an expression, a metaphor that describes an offending, disturbing, shocking, or vexing conduct, action, or pattern of behavior, such as schizophrenia, as an "illness" or "disease". Szasz wrote: "If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic."[8] While people behave and think in ways that are very disturbing, and that may resemble a disease process (pain, deterioration, response to various interventions), this does not mean they actually have a disease. To Szasz, disease can only mean something people "have," while behavior is what people "do"... Psychiatry actively obscures the difference between (mis)behavior and disease, in its quest to help or harm parties to conflicts. By calling certain people "diseased", psychiatry attempts to deny them responsibility as moral agents, in order to better control them."]
And,
On the other hand, "It takes a whole village to raise a child..."
Are you your brother's keeper?
 and who is your brother or neighbor?

van gogh the good samaritan

Post 1 on this issue

(crime summary and mental health issues) HERE

Post 2 on this

  issue (blame) HERE

The news cycle conversation regarding
The murderous behavior of Jared Lee Loughner has moved
to a discussion of mental illness.
 (Having mightily embarrassed themselves, journalists are pretending they were not just involved in the most self-serving, illogical focus on a news story of the new millennium. By the way, are pornographers who push it on us 24-7 responsible for all the sexual assault? Are violent rap songs responsible for girl-friend beating? just asking...)

Consider the development of unstable or troubling behavior in those around us.
Ask yourself, truthfully,
would you do anything, step outside your comfort zone to practically FORCE a person to get psychological help?
We assume "someone else" will do something--but the nature, particularly of thought problems or schizotypal disorders, often means
 there is no "someone else."


The friend of Jared Lee Loughner, who spoke to Mother Jones's Nick Baumann, gives us some information about the timeline of psychological (if not biological) troubles for JLL.
Imagine
Yourself
dealing with a friend:.
"Tierney, who first met Loughner in middle school, recalls that Loughner started to act strange around his junior or senior year of high school. Before that, Loughner was just a "normal kid," says Tierney. When the two friends started hanging out in sophomore year of high school, "there was nothing really dark about Jared," Tierney says. "He was playing drums, doing band things, playing sax. He was raised on writing and reading music." Loughner also did a lot of creative writing in his high school days, Tierney says, and he used to carry around a copy of a short story he wrote involving a character named Angel; he'd ask people if they would like to read it. "It had a lot of hidden metaphors in it," Tierney says.
As Loughner and Tierney grew closer, Tierney got used to spending the first ten minutes or so of every day together arguing with Loughner's "nihilist" view of the world. "By the time he was 19 or 20, he was really fascinated with semantics and how the world is really nothing—illusion," Tierney says.  More HERE

Back in a bit.

ok, MORE HERE