What to do with psychos

Rich Lowry:

IN early 21st-century America, what do you do when you encounter a severely mentally ill person?

Anyone who lives in the city knows the answer to that question - you step around him on the sidewalk; you hope he doesn't hassle you; maybe you give him some money.

The authorities at Virginia Tech did their own version of this urban shuffle in their handling of Cho Seung-Hui. It's obviously much easier to realize that someone is dangerously deranged after he has killed 32 people than when dealing with uncertain knowledge in an environment where any wrong (or even correct) move means a lawsuit. But Virginia Tech often tiptoed around Cho's mental disturbance.

When his "poetry" was read aloud in a class, it was so terrifying that at the next meeting of the class only seven of 70 students showed up. Cho was removed from that class, and another professor began to tutor him one-on-one, but only after establishing a secret code word with her assistant to signal when she should call security.

Another alarmed professor went to her dean with worries about Cho. She was told that nothing could be done, so he was simply placed off to the side of the seminar, where he said nothing and his disturbing writings weren't read aloud.

That's a microcosm of how we've handled many of the mentally ill during the great deinstitutionalization of the past 30 years, when they've been left to their own devices - and often to the streets or prison - rather than treated.

There are many reasons for this - the rise of psychotropic drugs, budget cuts, expanded conceptions of civil rights - but one intellectual current behind the trend was a moral disempowerment of sanity. One of the most influential academics of the late 20th century, Michel Foucault, argued that attempts to label and treat madness were inherently arbitrary and repressive. Academia has been celebrating "transgression" ever since.

Any attempt to romanticize madness has an incontrovertible answer in Cho Seung-Hui. This is what madness truly is: lonely, painful, shattering and, potentially, murderous. After seeing the sick trail of misery left by such transgression, can we expend some of the same intellectual energy honoring wholesome normality?

Behind some of the plaints of Virginia Tech staff that nothing could be done about Cho, you can hear the undercurrent: Who were we to judge? Of course, if he had occasionally uttered racial slurs rather than frightening those around him with bizarre behavior, the full apparatus of administrative power at Virginia Tech would have been brought down on him.

...

Well at least he wasn't a racist.

Even uttering somewhat racist remarks can result in a career death penalty, but being truly crazy, not so much.

The ACLU and Hollywood have turned the mentally ill into victims, and no one wants to be Nurse Ratched. We now see that turning them loose not only makes the streets unpleasant, but dangerous. But the left is unlikely to see that as the problem. They will focus on his hand gun and not the hand that held it.