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Pelosi, DePape, and the Politics of Mental Illness
The news has come out that Paul Pelosi’s assailant DePape has admitted it was political. That he admitted he was indeed there to force Nancy to tell the truth. For most of the Twit-punditry, this has meant a spiked football for them. The Right’s narrative is destroyed! The Right encourages violence and they need to pay!
However comma…
I see it more damaging to D’Souza’s narrative, of which I’ve already been skeptical. I don’t want to give this more print than has already been given, but it makes a rather salacious story. There are indeed questions that remain unanswered about the entire progression of events, but this narrative only partially answers any of those questions while raising even more.
More importantly, though, DePape’s confession does nothing to change the idea that he’s most likely suffering from psychosis of some sort, and here’s the thing with people who are psychotic: just about everything they do makes perfect sense to themselves. There’s no recognition that, say, breaking into the Pelosi house and threatening bodily harm to Nancy Pelosi until she admits her malfeasance might actually be downright insane. It makes perfect sense to them. Michael Schellenberger discusses this situation in a bit more detail here:
The media are portraying the suspect in the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband as a man fundamentally driven by right-wing ideology. But it's obvious to anyone who looks that what drove David DePape to violence was drug-induced paranoid psychosis.https://t.co/qfs5zHokni
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 29, 2022
I’m speaking with a bit of experience here. We have a family member who’s suffering from serious mental illness. So things like, “I don’t like what this church has done in the past, so I’m going to attempt to burn down this church building” didn’t come off as downright bad decisions to them. They just went ahead and started the process. And that’s just a part of the things they’ve done that most would consider alarming and crazy. There’s nothing in them that says, “Hey, don’t do that — that’s crazy!” And it’s hard to get them help, because as far as they perceive, they are completely rational individuals.
And here’s the other thing: If those who are dangerously mentally ill aren’t properly cared for, the Pelosi situation, our family situation, these things aren’t avoidable. Because the psychosis will just grasp on something as an excuse and just go with it.
There’s a lot more detail on this latter problem in Insane Consequences by D. J. Jaffe, which details just how bad it is for those suffering from serious and dangerous mental illness and how the socio-political situation leaves them (and those who happen to be around them) out on a limb to fend for themselves. The fact that the Democrats jumped on a chance to politicize this against their opponents right out the gate speaks volumes of their character. The fact a lot of Republicans clung to the salacious rumor a day or two afterward also speaks volumes of their character.
I highly recommend this book to understand the politics of mental illness in America and how damaging it is at present.
Meanwhile, there’s a man suffering psychosis who’s shown he’s willing to hurt others and he’s getting little help. There are plenty more like him on the streets with the same potential for violence of some sort and it’s all swept under the rug. And the fact that we can’t make headway to help him, to help our family member, because the system wants to score easy points, angers me the most. And I won’t say more, because I’m honestly about to go into a rather blue-worded rant if I continue.
Published in Politics
Jerry, do you plan to leave the legal profession over its reliance upon man-made law? As I understand it, Gospel arguments are frowned upon in court.
Well at this point I suspect it’s not my lack of clarity here. Indeed, punishment is an entire different topic off of my point: That we have an issue in how we address serious mental illness, and our government’s unwillingness to address the problem at all in favor of political gamesmanship is all but guaranteeing more hammers to skulls, so to speak.
Sadly, once this man is prosecuted (and he will be I’ve no doubt — the Left’s softness toward crime stops at their own skins), then is perhaps when he’ll actually get the help he desperately needs even if he is entirely unable to recognize that he needs it. Because of how policy is set regarding mental illness as a whole, it’s often nothing happens until someone’s head is caved in with a hammer. It’s highly likely DePape* needed help for some time, but would probably never get anything until he committed a serious crime.
Is justice required? Of course it is, and we shouldn’t be shy about it. But let’s just say this argument is not to be easy on people who apply hammers to skulls, but rather begging people to consider policies that could help prevent or at the very least greatly reduce the number of incidents of such.
Instead we get a rush of moral preening and attempts to score political points against one’s opponents. And having family where help is needed, it’s infuriating.
*I don’t know for certain he is. I mean, the premise that Pelosi is a dishonest politician is not a stretch by any means. However, when one decides that one can singlehanded wring the truth from a politician armed only with a hammer, I tend to assume one isn’t in one’s right mind.
Yes, well.
When you’re a–hmmm….hammer–everything’s a nail.
Jerry, where did Jesus ever even hint at the death penalty by human governmental agency as treatment for demonic thinking or demon possession?
He healed people and cast out demons, which is loving your enemies, and warned all who sinned to repent so as to prevent any return.
Help me out. Has someone actually presented a plausible account of what happened that night? How did DePape get there/in? Who opened the door for police? Has the footage been shared?
No video has been shown that I know of.
There is the FBI affidavit that says about opening the door:
At 2:31 a.m., San Francisco Police Department (“SFPD”) Officer Colby Wilmes responded to the Pelosi residence, California and knocked on the front door. When the door was opened, Pelosi and DEPAPE were both holding a hammer with one hand and DEPAPE had his other hand holding onto Pelosi’s forearm. Pelosi greeted the officers. The officers asked them what was going on. DEPAPE responded that everything was good. Officers then asked Pelosi and DEPAPE to drop the hammer. DEPAPE pulled the hammer from Pelosi’s hand and swung the hammer, striking Pelosi in the head.
Might there be a vulnerable stage there, when the person who has been medicated comes off the meds? What I mean is could it be that the decision to come off the meds was made because of some chemical change which was beginning while they were still on the medication?
In other words the dosage or drug was ceasing to be effective and even while on them the patient was losing their ability to reason?
I’m wondering this as I’ve a friend who takes her medication but it doesn’t prevent her making startling decisions from time to time
Medications don’t always keep people from decompensation.
And by the way, they have side effects that can stink. It is hard.
Quoted for emphasis.
*cough COVID cough*
I’ve done a lot of criminal defense over the years, and I would say, if anything, mental illness is under-diagnosed and under-treated in our criminal law system. I admit I’m just talking about what I’ve seen personally, so I don’t claim that it’s a large sample size.
Still, I think I think I can say with some confidence that your average criminal defendant has no means to shop around for an insanity diagnosis. That just doesn’t happen in numbers sufficient to move the needle on crime rates. That takes thousands of dollars these people don’t have.
In my area, probably 75% to 80% of criminal defendants are indigent and qualify for the public defender or appointed counsel when the PD has a conflict. That percentage is even higher among those who have even a hint of mental illness. When you can make a case that mental illness is a possibility, the court will pay for one initial evaluation – but everyone uses the same place in every case. There’s no shopping around. Those doctors are neutral, and they do sometimes find someone to be insane, but this takes more than just a garden variety mental illness. And it is a scientific evaluation, and they do often come to the conclusion that the defendant is malingering – faking it.
The issue of mental illness then becomes more of a sentencing factor – what do we do with this person who probably does suffer from a chemical imbalance in their brain which affects their behavior, makes it more difficult than the average person to make the morally correct decision, but doesn’t render them incapable of it. This is where the fight usually is, and again, these people mostly have no resources to really make a case for a proper course of medication and supervision. So you end up with some mix of ham-handed attempts by the courts and by probation departments to handle it. This often ends with the court throwing up its hands and sending them to prison.
This matches what I saw working in community mental health.
I’m often a bit surprised when Christians on Ricochet are so filled with animus towards this or that group. The Christians all seemed so nice and charitable.
I know that forgiveness is the hardest thing so it’s only fair I give Christians quite alot of slack for failing to live up to the hardest religious impulse but sometimes I worry that they don’t give it the old college try.
If things were really easy, Christ wouldn’t need to reiterate what we need to do so much.
The confession of a mentally ill man under duress will do little to expose the truth.
Yes, and Jesus said over and over again to rejoice and not to fear.
Maybe those are the people who still need to be institutionalized in some way, if the medications really aren’t effective.
True; neither will the dock lamentations of a criminal who wishes to explain away his behavior to a credulous audience. “Maxwell must go free!”
I’m sorry to have hijacked a charter member’s thread, but it was inevitable.
Part of what is missing in the ongoing discussion about paranoid schizophrenics–a diagnosis that we cannot today apply to Mr DePape, but which seems likely–is the institutionalization of the criminally insane.
Most of the people traditionally described as “insane” do in fact suffer schizophrenia. They suffer this, they do not want it nor do they bring it on themselves by moral laxity.
If someone is insane, we should treat him.
If he eschews therapy, then commits a crime, we should jail him, but in a therapeutic setting. We used to do this, and it did not always go well.
Hard cases make for hard law. The same is true of medicine.
Well said.
The abusing of the mentally ill excuse by defense lawyers has cost those truly ill some sympathy.
All too true. After decades of struggle with my stepson’s very serious, frightening, threatening, and chronic mental illness, and only a couple of years before he died, he got into enough trouble with the law that he was jailed for a measurable period of time and came to the attention of the Allegheny County Jail’s forensic psychologist (someone with the same sort of job that Theodore Dalrymple/Anthony Daniels had in the Birmingham (UK) city jails at one time in his life.)
She phoned us. I picked the phone up. And, as I wrote in this post:
Half the book is written. “Accomplices to Insanity” is the title. Because that’s what the authorities are, when it comes to the seriously, genuinely, catastrophically, mentally ill. They’ve taken sides. And they’re on the side of enabling the insanity of people like Sam.** (I largely exempt the Pittsburgh Police, and the Washington County Community Mental Health Clinic from this opprobrium. They’re the only outfits that tried–over the long term–their damndest to get Sam actual help and to keep him safe and relatively reality-oriented.)
So pardon me if I get a little hot under the collar when confronted with ignoramuses who (despite their obvious brains and smarts) narrow-mindedly insist that people like Sam must be sinful and malevolent grifters who deserve the harshest punishment and penalties for their behavior, because–surely–they’re just faking it. And who state that the conservative credentials of people like myself must be defective or fraudulent because we’re just some sort of hippy-dippy nutjobs who think it’s OK to be Trans. (Somehow, it always comes back to “Trans.” Don’t ask me why. I don’t think I want to know.)
And, BTW, I think that a fair reading of Theodore Dalrymple/Anthony Daniels will reveal that he does, indeed, believe that the criminally insane and chronically mentally ill do exist in our society, and that he–in fact–reserves his most potent scorn not for them but for the failures of understanding and treatment by the authorities, who’ve chosen to confuse “bad behavior” with “mental illness.” Nowhere, that I’m aware, does Dalrymple/Daniels posit that mental illness isn’t real, or that people should not be appropriately treated for it.
I’m beyond grateful that so many of you listened and were kind, over some of the worst years of my life. Here are a few of the posts from that time. Thank you.
https://ricochet.com/537216/our-sam/
https://ricochet.com/546881/on-forgiving/
https://ricochet.com/659332/justice-for-sam-sort-of-or-the-best-we-could-do-anyway/
https://ricochet.com/692298/a-just-judge/
Yes. I think a case could be made–for those with ears to hear–that this is Dalrymple/Daniels’s most useful contribution to the discussion–not only from the standpoint of defense lawyers, but by society-at-large.
**There is no better example of the “accomplices to insanity” mindset than that the judicial process which commits an obviously mentally ill person who’s acting irrationally and is a demonstrable danger to himself and/or others, to a psychiatric ward for a brief (in PA it’s 72 hours) period of involuntary commitment, during which the first things he’s asked, as part of the admission process, are 1) whether the hospital is allowed to notify and talk to his family about the situation, and 2) whether he’s ever been treated or hospitalized for mental illness in the past. The patient’s answers to both these questions–which are treated as coming from the lips of a rational and sane adult–are always “NO,” and “NO.” And the cycle continues.
You are so spot on with this comment @She.
If it weren’t for one sister testifying, in court, that the other sister was a threat to herself and others, the schizophrenic sister would not have been committed to a group home and had a truly awful end. Instead, she was kept on medication, was part of the community and family, and had a much better life than one on the streets.
Thankfully, it never got to law enforcement levels, but it did get to the legal system. Schizophrenia is a disease, not a flaw or something that makes a person deserving of punishment. What they need is treatment. And to keep getting that treatment, there needs to be a controlled and enforced environment.
I’ve often thought that what we need to do is switch family members. By the time a paranoid schizophrenic can possibly be helped, he or she has blown up every single relationship he or she ever had. It is very similar to alcoholism–it’s a family disease. It is very hard, if not impossible, to be calm and objective when someone is attacking you all the time.
Yet the people who understand it the best are those who have lived with it. So perhaps the ultimate answer is some version of “I’ll help yours if you’ll help mine.” :)
We can do a lot in terms of rehabilitation. But it takes time. And emotional support. And a calm steady out-stretched hand.
I can’t say this strongly enough for people reading about this disorder. Don’t give up hope. Sometimes these stories end tragically, but sometimes they end well. It certainly did for the paranoid schizophrenic in my life.
There used to be a sort of rule in psychiatry, that a third of patients who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia had one bout of it, and they responded to treatment, and it never happened again.
A middle third did quite well with a lot of support combined with a low but constant maintenance dose of the available medication–which very often combined a beta blocker, an antianxiety drug (Klonopin), and a mild antipsychotic (Risperdal used to fill this spot–I don’t know what’s in it now), and an anti-Parkinson’s drug. (Parkinson’s is the flip side of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is the result of too much dopamine; Parkinson’s is too little. I pray that the Parkinson’s researchers will find answers for schizophrenia and that the schizophrenia researchers will find answers for Parkinson’s.) This semi-functioning group has done so well over the last forty years that we are now talking about long-term-care problems. What joyous news that is! When I began this odyssey, 50 percent of paranoid schizophrenics killed themselves.
At any rate, the last third did not respond to the medication very well at all. The last time I got into this subject, no one knew why. And perhaps this number smaller now.
But don’t ever lose hope. It’s an adventure. I can’t think of anything more exciting in this life than seeing a paranoid schizophrenic be restored for even a minute. It is quite something to see.
I didn’t lose hope. I always hoped that the “authorities” in the medical, legal, and law enforcement professions would–one day–see it as more important that they should work to keep my loved one safe and reality-based (even if it meant taking away some of his “rights”) than that they would succumb to woke nonsense about his “right” to his “lifestyle” or his “right” to live beyond his reason, and his “right” to destroy himself. Sadly, and ultimately, when his head was bashed in by a couple of queer and drug-addled thugs, I gave up. I never lost hope in him. I only lost hope in us.
Yeah. Sam was restored, time and time again, for a minute. For an hour. For a day, a week, or a month. For as long as he stayed on his meds, and until he decided that he was sane and that he didn’t need them anymore. Sadly, again, society supported him in that delusion, and his decision to abandon the medicine that kept him “restored,” and he couldn’t manage to keep himself afloat beyond that.
They can’t do it on their own. And when we pretend that they can, we fail them.
It is hard, unfair, and sad.
There is hope. Before Haldol came along, a psychiatrist once wrote, no one could even talk to paranoid schizophrenics. Haldol changed everything. For a long time, Haldol was called a “major tranquilizer,” which is an apt term for it (valium being a “minor tranquilizer”).
Not in time for Sam. But perhaps in time for others.
But Haldol has been around since the 1960s.
The problem isn’t the availability of drugs. There are lots of drugs, several generations on from Haldol, some of them enormously effective—although not without the cost of unpleasant side effects—during the time that the patient is compliant with the prescribed regime. Unfortunately, that’s very often not for very long. And once the patient goes off his meds, there are almost no societal guardrails to insure that he gets back on track, absent a precipitating and often criminal or dangerous event. And even then, after 48 or 72 hours of “treatment,” he’s often back on the streets, having “agreed” to voluntary follow-up and to take his meds. (This is the fallacy of treating a person who’s in the hospital only because he’s shown himself to be incapable of rational behavior as if he is a rational being once he gets there.) Of course, that rarely happens either. The problem’s the illness and the process, not the quantity or quality of drugs available to treat the condition.
I was only referring to MarciN’s comment about Haldol being “Not in time for Sam.” Unless that all happened before 1967 or so, Haldol was around.