In the wake of the Connecticut murders of school children, the talk shows have as part of their narrative the issue of mental health and how so many of the mass shooters in our recent history have been mentally ill.
Let me start with a trick question: What is the largest mental institution in the United States (and probably the world)? Answer appears below.
As many of the talk show guests have pointed out, there is tremendous stigma attached to mental illness, especially in minority communities. This used to be a common stigma even among the majority, white population.
(Go below the trivet for more.)
Let me give a personal example.
In November, 1928, my paternal grandmother was committed to the Harrisburg (Pa.) Hospital for the Insane. (You can see the grounds of this institution in the movie "Girl Interrupted".) She died there in 1984. I never met her nor did I know anything about her until I was in high school. (I was born in 1948.)
My father told me about her and he was angry when he did so because he wanted to emphasize how I should never tell anyone about her or her condition. He told how he had to endure taunts from classmates when he was a child about how his mother was in the "nut house".
He never told me what her diagnosis was. When she was first committed, my father went to live in a Roman Catholic orphanage in Immaculata, Pa. He used to say that the orphanage was run by the Sisters of deSade. They (the nuns) used to have the traditional beads hanging down one side of their habit and leather straps (for whipping) hanging down the other side.
The stigma attached to mental health issues has slowly (but not completely) faded amongst the majority, white population. However, there is still the problem of how to pay for the help, which is not cheap. It may be that my grandmother was lucky. If she had been younger, she might well have been released onto the streets when the mental institutions were emptied out beginning in the late 1960's.
To answer the question posed above, the largest mental institution in the United States is the Los Angeles County jail system. The inmate population constitutes the largest collection of mentally ill persons in the nation.
From 1998 to 2008, I worked as a private attorney taking criminal appointments when the Public Defender had a conflict. There are all sorts of protections for the mentally il and the mentally challenged written into California law. I used to invoke those protections as a matter of routine.
However, judges and prosecutors hate this because it gums up the works. The Bench has an overwhelming work load. The pressure is on the defense attorneys to ignore the mental health problems of their clients and move them through.
Thus, we treat mental health issues now by waiting until the mentally ill commit some sort of petty crime. Then we lock them away without treatment, thus guaranteeing that they come out of the criminal justice system with more severe mental illness than when they entered.
The signs are there but society ignores them in the name of efficiency of the courts. Then they come back to bite us on the behind when they do something horrific.