Here's how it starts:
A DANGER TO SOCIETY
Bedlam Revisited
Why the Virginia Tech shooter was not committed.
BY JONATHAN KELLERMAN
Monday, April 23, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
I was in graduate school, studying clinical psychology when they began shutting down the asylums. The place was California, the time was the early 1970s, and "they" were an unprecedented confederation of progressives, libertarians and fiscal conservatives.
He rips R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz in particular. I don't know much about Laing - he sounds like an idiot, but I only know about him from Kellerman, here, and Szasz - but Kellerman's points against Szasz seem to me to have more to do with the actual history than with what Szasz is trying to accomplish.
I think Kellerman is right that what has happened with our Mental Institutions is partially due to Szasz' opposition to psychiatry as it's been practiced. But the actual history has been carried out by "liberals" and fiscal conservatives, neither of whom have read much Szasz.
Szasz not only believes that treatment must be voluntary, but that each person must be held responsible for all of his own actions: you may never be absolved of responsibility due to mental incapacity. If you commit a crime, you do time.
I'm not much of a scab-picker, so I don't know where that would have left us in the case of Virginia Tech. Did the detestable worm ever do anything for which he should have been imprisoned?
Kellerman's a great writer, in any case. I believe the guy's just sold me a couple books.
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