Today 20 children and eight adults
are dead in another senseless act. Once
again a sick man has chosen to take the lives of innocents as he commits
suicide. There will be many who will use
this as a time to call for the elimination of guns from American society, and
there will be just as many who rush to argue for the opposite. We’ve become a society of polar opposites
where compromise and rational problem solving is no longer possible.
What will be lost in these
posturing’s will be any real discussion on what are the basic causes of this
insanity that seems to be growing in our society and what we as individuals,
local governments, and state governments and the federal government might be
able to do to address the root causes. I
saw an interesting posting from a nurse on Facebook. It coincided with something I’ve been
thinking about for some time, and I guess it is as good a time as any to
voice it.
In the 1960’s, New York State had a
large number of psychiatric hospitals holding tens of thousands of patients
with a large variety of diagnosis, ranging from childhood autism up to
geriatric dementia and criminal insanity.
From my most limited experiences working at one of those institutions it
was obvious to me this hospital was really a large holding institution where
the doctors prescribed Thorazine to keep many of those residents in a stupor so
they were easy to maintain.
Since then, medial science and the
social sciences have progressed and become enlightened. You can say what you will about the patients civil rights, but the State closed most of those institutions for financial reasons when the
costs became overwhelming. Fortunately
for New York, the drug companies have developed a whole world of new chemicals
to supposedly restore balance to depressed, psychotic, neurotic, or manic
minds, so these people can have apparently normal lives and become useful members of
society and be returned to the streets and communities to live with us.
Not feeling quite right, there is
a drug for that! Not happy with the way
your child is, give him or her some Adderall.
Anxious about the job interview, pop a Valium, can’t sleep at night,
Ambien is just the thing. There are
amphetamines to stimulate, barbiturates to depress, psychotropic to treat
schizophrenia, bipolar, attention deficit and the list goes on.
I wonder how many people live
their lives in this medically approved drug culture where how they feel, and
what they think each day depends on the color of the pill they took when they
woke up? Or more to the point, how many Psychiatrists
actually stay on top of the medications they are prescribing to their patients
so they know with certainty they are not creating the next mass
murderer?
No comments:
Post a Comment