Sunday, October 8, 2017

Allowing mental illness diagnostics to get in the way of fixing personal accountability

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4902488/Russian-carries-baby-s-head-streets.html
Russia: Killer 'decapitates 18-month-old toddler and brandishes the girl's head in the street' after being released from a psychiatric hospital
>> A very disturbing incident, but I want to focus not on the horrid theatrics at the outcome but on the assumptions made by the authorities at the input that led to this sad situation:

... Six years ago, the knifeman had killed a female shop assistant in the same city, repeatedly stabbing her with a knife in a drunken rage. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sent by a judge to a high security hospital for treatment. The man was released recently as 'healthy', it was reported.

>> and an earlier sentence that makes more sense now:
... The man's niece Tatiana (whose baby got killed) had earlier pleaded with the authorities not to release him from psychiatric hospital, fearing he remained a danger after he had killed a woman six years ago.

>> Let's designate the murdered baby's mother as the victim here, as she's understandably borne the most loss here. So the victim had WARNED the authorities AGAINST letting a dangerous criminal loose, whom they had believed, after having violently stabbed a woman to death 6 years ago, to be merely suffering from a mental illness and they thought it's the illness that made him do what he did and that he wasn't actually a murderer. With that diagnosis a murderer escaped a murder charge, got out of confinement in just 6 years by proving that his illness is "gone now", and has now visited untold horror upon his relative who KNEW he wasn't "innocent" by slaughtering her baby. Not to mention the authorities forced her to put up with having him where she and her children lived. Assuming that he knew about his niece's warnings, it is obvious this man's choice of next victim had a revenge element in it.

>> Who are the criminals here in the larger picture? It was the psychologists who made the diagnosis, and the judge(s) who decided on that basis that the earlier woman's killing should not be treated as a murder and so we don't need to hold the killer responsible for his actions.

>> Allowing mental illness diagnostics to get in the way of fixing personal accountability on what people do. That's what caused this tragedy. Will the people who were being so affectionate with the killer ever care to show some of that affection with the bereaved mother, who, I will repeat, had WARNED them against their judgement and who had to pay the ultimate price for it? 

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