New laws cross thin line

A societal proclivity: In calamity’s wake, officialdom scurries to prevent recurrence. These plans, properly laid, frequently succeed when the disaster involves flawed human engineering, as in the Titanic. The results are perfectly flawed when the intention is to circumvent tragedy springing from the frailty of the human mind. Man’s instinct here is Pyrrhic, thundering in the fashion of a herd over its own in pursuit of solitary victories.

So it is in the case of the Virginia Tech massacre. Since Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students and teachers and then himself two years ago at Tech, Virginia has passed a law of particular note: one that took effect last summer, providing officials with greater latitude to hospitalize the mentally ill against their will.

That measure, described in the lead story of today’s newspaper, along with others, are well-intentioned and have their merits. The former is the particular product of Cho, whose rampage took place after a brush with the system 16 months earlier, when he spent a night under “temporary detention” and was examined by a psychiatrist. At the time, the law required a judgment of an “imminent” threat before a patient could be involuntarily committed. The psychiatrist did not believe Cho met this standard and a judge released him. The thinking is that the current law likely would have resulted in Cho’s being hospitalized before he opened fire.

Two facts are neglected in this logic. The first: Had Cho been hospitalized, he almost certainly would have been released long before the attacks at Tech. The second: Figures like Cho are rare and their actions difficult to predict. Making laws based on such people invariably produces inherent abuses of the liberties of those who are ill but not killers.

“The mental health system does not prevent violence and can’t be relied upon to – it can’t screen for violence,” psychiatrist and author Dr. Peter Breggin told The News Virginian for today’s front-page story. Referring to Cho, Breggin repeated a lament made in this space. “They never even contacted his family,” a step he contends is more vital than medications in helping patients recover.

Students of mental health’s history in this country also might notice institutions’ limits as panaceas. Long gone are the days when facilities such as Western State Hospital in Staunton served as little more than grim warehouses for society’s discards, the sort of people Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, a shrill voice of another era, referred to as “defectives.” Still, even with today’s advances, shuttling more people into the embrace of the system, which can be stifling, may block rather than open avenues to recovery.

“The concept of institutionalization ... some people think it’s OK, but patients don’t advance,” said Ben Smoke, the director of a mental health recovery group based in Staunton. “They despair ... .”

Seeking to protect the mentally ill from hazards they might pose to themselves or others is the aim of the state’s new laws and that aim is laudable. Somewhere, though, there is a line that shifts and fades, marking the place where reasonable measures to prevent people from inflicting harm on themselves or others turn to treating those who would do neither as undeserving of the liberties and respect accorded the rest of society.

While many mental health officials ardently have supported the laws passed in the wake of the Tech tragedy, we concur with others in the field as well as some patients who fear lines have been crossed and needlessly.