The Big Event and Unrealistic Reportage

Posted on July 26, 2007 in Journalists & Pundits Mania

The New York Post has been dancing around the story of one William Johns III (no middle name? Amazing!) who got off his meds last year (oh the timeliness of it all) and tried to grab a little boy from his mother. Bipolar is news and the Post, in the tradition of [[Spiderman|Spiderman’s]] [[J._Jonah_Jameson|Jameson]], has been wearing out the wires of its Net connection with the escapades of the Drink Shrink, aka the Mad-Doc son.

We shouldn’t let the Murdochization of bipolar reportage distract us from a very salient issue, namely what to do about those of our number who are in severe psychoses. Studies show that overall, bipolars and other sufferers of mental illness have a lower tendency towards violence than the regular population, but when you separate out those in severe psychosis this number turns upside down. Johns went off his meds. For what reason? Apparently because the patch was uncomfortable. Setting aside his cognitive understanding of the disease, he chose to wing it. And the result was an attack on an unsuspecting woman.

America is a strange country where a high crime rate (due to the ready availability of guns) does not faze the public. Yet when a bipolar goes on the rampage it makes front page news, giving those of us who conscientiously take our meds the same bad name as those who don’t. Revealing that you are bipolar is as big a party killer as saying your colostomy bag just sprang a leak. There needs to be some intelligent policing of those who won’t take their meds that can identify those on the precipice of psychosis without inhibiting the freedom of those who make an effort.

Strangely, the laws which protect us from forced hospitalization if we are neither violent or suicidal were largely crafted to protect members of cults. During the seventies, many parents were upset at the tactics of groups such as the [[Moonies]] who would isolate potential members for months at a time while they practiced [[brainwashing]]. Parents of adult children would use the sanity provisions of law to extract cult members from the compounds and submit them to [[deprogramming]].

The tabloid version of the “Bipolar Problem” doesn’t consider this history. Instead it blares a charge against unrestrained psychotics while not proposing a solution. Making it appear that the whining of the family will triumph over a videotape and psychiatric good sense sells papers. At the same time, it puts we who suffer from bipolar disorder in an unsettling place.

I am reminded here about the hysteria generated in the wake of [[Nine Eleven]] when Americans were tormented and teased into granting a blank check to an administration which, before the event, had done decidedly nothing to face the problem of terrorism. Then instead of improving our foreign relations, we adopted a policy which destroyed our credibility in world affairs. If an unmedicated, psychotic bipolar commits an act on the level of the World Trade Center bombing, what can we expect? Better medical care? Or a return to the horrific hospitals of former days?

A lasting solution demands a public health initiative of the sort that neoconservatives and privatized health insurance do not want. Our standardized-tests-crazed educational establishment, for one, does nothing to teach children and teenagers about the symptoms of our illnesses. Organizations such as NAMI and DBSA occasionally invade the schools for this purpose, but it is not enough. Not only do people need to be educated in recognizing the symptoms, but they have to learn how to talk to people who are in episode.

Laura’s Law has been touted in California and elsewhere as an answer to taking care of those who want treatment but are denied it or those who refuse it despite their being gravely ill. So far, only one California County — Los Angeles — has implemented the act. We here in Orange County, for example, keep hearing the promises that Laura’s Law will be put into operation but so far have seen no action. Perhaps the problem ought to be handled at a state rather than a county level but neoconservative pressures to decentralize and cut taxes makes this unlikely.

So in the meantime, we watch and wait for the Big Event that will result in us being locked up. Every time there is an incident involving a mentally ill person in the media, reactionaries proclaim draconian measures to prevent any of us from living on the outside. We laughed at the ideas they promoted about terrorism and foreign affairs until Nine Eleven benumbed us and allowed them to sneak in their obscene and ill-founded agenda of Ever-Lasting War. Can we afford to just sit around, seeing no response to the yellow journalism of the Post and ABC News?

Suffice to say that histrionic solutions aren’t going to make the disease go away or further the cause of recovery.