{"id":816,"date":"2013-01-08T16:46:03","date_gmt":"2013-01-09T00:46:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=816"},"modified":"2013-01-08T16:46:03","modified_gmt":"2013-01-09T00:46:03","slug":"why-dont-they-lock-up-the-nuts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=816","title":{"rendered":"Why Don’t They Lock Up the Nuts?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I as talking with an acquaintance who was dismayed and a bit angry at the murders by nuts around the country. \u201cWhy don\u2019t they lock \u2018em up?\u201d It turned out that she really believed that psychiatrists were able to tell with some degree of accuracy who was really dangerous and who wasn\u2019t. She was a little sobered by my telling her that we don\u2019t<\/strong><\/em> know how to tell who\u2019s dangerous other than the very obvious ones who can\u2019t lie: They say they\u2019re planning to kill someone or themselves. That\u2019s enough to justify an \u201cinvoluntary hold.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the vast majority of people who are dangerous, if asked by docs, \u201cAre you dangerous?\u201d\u2014no matter how cleverly, can tell that this is a trick question. They sense that they\u2019re being asked if they want to be locked up for their own safe-keeping or the safety of others. A very few are relieved and answer frankly\u2014they want protection. Many, though, just lie: \u201cOf course not!\u201d And psychiatrists really can\u2019t read minds! If they\u2019re not acting up right then, or have been caught in the act or have a lot of evidence that they were planning something violent, mental health personnel don\u2019t know much more than anyone else!<\/p>\n

The advances in psychiatry  have been made only with folks who voluntarily enter the sick role. Or they have already been adjudged as dangerously mentally ill. But that is usually based on what they did, not on what they haven\u2019t done yet. Another way to say this is that there may be one hundred people who have the profile or are quirky in their mind that would be pretty suspicious, but only one who then does it, and we don\u2019t know how to select that one who really is trouble. There are also five out of a thousand at the next level, folks who are mildly troubled, but the five who start shooting up their family or neighborhood may well not have been among the top one hundred who might arouse suspicion.<\/p>\n

So two realities need to be noted: (1) We can\u2019t begin to afford to lock up the suspicious ones, and (2) there are humungous civil rights problems over who is thought to be \u201cdangerous\u201d! In a culture of innocent until proven guilty, justification for \u201clocking someone up\u201d needs far more than mere suspicion. Psychiatry is credited with a power to read minds, to peer into and see our darkest fantasies. It isn\u2019t so. Well, there\u2019s a slight\u2014very slight\u2014art in seeing through phoniness, but I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s something shrinks can do better than street-smart folks who say, \u201cYou can\u2019t bulls**t a bulls**tter.\u201d)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I as talking with an acquaintance who was dismayed and a bit angry at the murders by nuts around the country. \u201cWhy don\u2019t they lock \u2018em up?\u201d It turned out that she really believed that psychiatrists were able to tell with some degree of accuracy who was really dangerous and who wasn\u2019t. She was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,26,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-psychology","category-psychotherapy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=816"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":817,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816\/revisions\/817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}