by Bruce Han­ify  Things changed for me as a result of being put into “the bucket” — the Invol­un­tary Treat­ment Act (“ITA”) hear­ings at the Memo­r­ial psy­chi­atric unit in Yakima.  Each of us pros­e­cu­tors in that rota­tion were there for a month at a time, twice a year.  With two “men­tal” hear­ings every week, that meant you were at the hos­pi­tal by 8 a.m. eight times a month.  Dur­ing that time I became famil­iar with the face of men­tal ill­ness.  How that affected me I could not have foreseen.

It grad­u­ally dawned on me that many decent human beings are trapped in some sort of rep­e­ti­tious chem­istry pat­tern from which they can’t escape.  I’ve heard crim­i­nal defen­dants say, “Your Honor! This isn’t me!”  And from my con­di­tion­ing, and my own prej­u­dice, I assumed they were mak­ing excuses.  My rota­tion through the ITA hear­ings taught me oth­er­wise.  What I finally saw was that there is this kind of sta­tic, or white noise, that oper­ates like an Atten­tion Deficit Dis­or­der in many peo­ple.  It’s like they can’t get their lit­tle mar­ble to roll down the same track every day.  Peo­ple who don’t overeat assume peo­ple who do are weak; peo­ple who per­form sim­i­lar func­tions every day assume those who can’t are moral fee­blings.  The fact is, depres­sion, overeat­ing and, in many cases, crim­i­nal con­duct, are func­tions of brain chemistry. But we don’t dis­cuss brain chem­istry. We thump peo­ple. Then we won­der why they don’t get fixed.

The dra­matic exam­ples are per­haps less instruc­tive.  I saw a lit­tle fel­low so far out of con­trol that it took three big lugs to throw him to the floor and strap him to a board.  Two days later, after the meds kicked in, he was a lucid and very intel­li­gent — and very charm­ing — fel­low.  His mother was a long-time edu­ca­tor, a Ph.D.  There was no short­age of intel­li­gence in that fam­ily!  What I learned from sev­eral of the psy­chi­a­trists was that fre­quently very intel­li­gent peo­ple are also not very sta­ble men­tally.  It goes with the turf.  Sev­eral psy­chi­a­trists have told me, for exam­ple, that you can’t have bi-polar dis­or­der unless you have a fairly impres­sive IQ.  One psy­chi­a­trist put it bluntly: “Stu­pid peo­ple don’t go bipolar.”

But the truly trou­bling cases are those folks who wan­der in and out of society’s insti­tu­tions with ghostly anonymity.  Their lives never gel.  They live with fear and anx­i­ety and con­flict, all of which com­pound one another over the years, a thick layer of scar tis­sue that suf­fo­cates the life from them.  After God knows how many tours through jails and men­tal hos­pi­tals, their self-image is shat­tered; and no mat­ter how much peo­ple put on the face of com­pas­sion, deep down these folks know them­selves as rejects.  They don’t really believe any­one is there to help them; they’ve stopped believ­ing any­one can.

It is truly aston­ish­ing how many peo­ple in the men­tal health pro­fes­sions don’t seem to have any gen­uine insight into suf­fer­ing.  The sys­tem is loaded with psy­chol­o­gists who believe they’re per­form­ing heal­ing func­tions when they say things like ‘cog­ni­tive’ or ‘behav­ioral’ while adopt­ing the most intel­lec­tual expres­sion they can muster.   It takes a rough and tum­ble Irish-American like myself to see it.  I some­times joked, “The Irish are born bipo­lar.”  Those of us who have felt the sting of lonely anguish have a gen­uine con­nec­tion with those who cry out, “Your Honor! This isn’t me!”  The prob­lem is, see­ing that and doing some­thing about it are two very dif­fer­ent things.

Bureau­cra­cies are not geared to address that very human side of things, which is a bit ironic when you think of it.  If gov­ern­ment funds can’t sus­tain an effec­tive heal­ing sys­tem for the men­tally ill, what would?  That’s a legit­i­mate ques­tion, to which there is no ready answer.  Most Amer­i­cans lazily assume that once the gov­ern­ment has spent money, the prob­lem is solved.  When you and I slough off our cre­ative, problem-solving pow­ers to an abstrac­tion, we really haven’t done any­thing except evade the issue.  I would describe that iner­tia as typ­i­cal of how we gov­ern our­selves in Amer­ica.  Cre­ativ­ity is local; gov­ern­ment is abstract.  Want to solve prob­lems?  Get in there and go to work.

A reader asked the other day, “Do you really believe that we have lawyers because peo­ple won’t accept respon­si­bil­ity?”  She then observed that when peo­ple try to argue their own cases in court, they are shut out.  This posi­tion has two prob­lems.  First, it assumes that ordi­nary peo­ple typ­i­cally make ratio­nal argu­ments, which isn’t true.  Peo­ple make emo­tional, not ratio­nal, argu­ments.  If it were oth­er­wise, this coun­try would be a very dif­fer­ent place.  The sec­ond prob­lem is that she missed my point. If your life can only be resolved in the court­room, you are not tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for it.

As a result of my tour through the men­tal health sys­tem, I con­cluded that we are bar­bar­ians when it comes to address­ing human suf­fer­ing.  We really don’t know what we’re doing.

And no, I don’t have an imme­di­ate answer.  One thing I do know is, Amer­i­can soci­ety would be wealth­ier and more peace­ful if peo­ple were encour­aged to pull their own weight with­out resort­ing to blame, whether penal blame, polit­i­cal blame, or any other kind of blame.  Blame doesn’t heal.  Respon­si­bil­ity does.

How to do that?  Do you have any ideas?

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BRUCE HANIFY 2012