The Horror of Jailing of Mentally Ill People Under Capitalism—And How Things Could Be Radically Different
March 10, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a Reader:
I was reading the Sunday Review section in the February 9, 2014 New York Times and came upon a column written by Nicholas Kristof, “Inside a Mental Hospital Called Jail.” First let me say the author is exposing something real, and clearly not advocating for it, but besides the appalling situation he is rightfully exposing, he offers little in the way of solutions. The article opens:
“The largest mental health center in America is a huge compound here in Chicago, with thousands of people suffering from manias, psychoses and other disorders, all surrounded by high fences and barbed wire.
“Just one thing: It’s a jail. The only way to get treatment is to be arrested.
“Psychiatric disorders are the only kind of sickness that we as a society regularly respond to not with sympathy but with handcuffs and incarceration. And as more humane and cost-effective ways of treating mental illness have been cut back, we increasingly resort to the law-enforcement tool-box: jails and prisons.”
As I read the rest of the article a shiver of rage went through my body. I knew this was a huge exposure of how the system of capitalism-imperialism works and that the readers of Revolution/revcom.us needed to know about this! I have been studying the recent special issue of Revolution: “You Don’t Know What You Think You ‘Know’ About... The Communist Revolution and the REAL Path to Emancipation: Its History and Our Future,” and I thought this was another opportunity to reveal how different things could be and how different they had, in fact, been in China when it was still on the road of revolution and which stands in stark contrast to the modern reality in that exists in America today as revealed in Kristof’s article.
First let me review some of the statistics cited in this article: he says that nationwide, more than three times as many mentally ill people are housed in prisons and jails as in hospitals (from a 2010 study by the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Treatment Advocacy Center), and 40 percent of people with serious mental illnesses have been arrested at some point in their lives. Some of the inmates that Kristof interviews cannot afford the medications they need and once released from prison go off the medications and relapse; many while on the “outside” cannot get access to the treatment they need and resort to drugs or alcohol to self-medicate. He points out that in the 1800s, there was a campaign led by Dorothea Dix against the incarceration of the mentally ill, and he ends the article by posing this question:
“Do we really want to go back two centuries? Doesn’t that seem not only inhumane but also deluded—on our part?”
To which I have to answer that now, when we have a much greater body of scientific knowledge, and many successful means and methods for the treatment of mental illness, this is not only deluded and inhumane, it is a criminal and horrific waste of human potential, and it doesn’t have to be this way!
So after studying Kristof’s Times column, I went back to a book that I’d read and studied a number of years ago. In Chapter 7 of China: Science Walks on Two Legs, the author describes a visit to Shanghai Psychiatric Hospital in 1973:
“Inside the hallways were bright and everything was spotless and simple. Sunlight streamed through the windows onto walls painted turquoise and white. There were none of the ominous or depressing intimations one feels on entering a state hospital at home, nor the antiseptic, all business atmosphere of glass, aluminum and linoleum of the fancy private hospital. It seemed like a friendly place.
“The treatment combines traditional Chinese and Western methods. Acupuncture and traditional herbal medicines are given, as well as synthetic chemical tranquilizers like chlorpromazine. During treatment patients are also given ‘education in ideology,’ in which they are taught to have a ‘correct attitude’ toward their illness. (The use of political study in mental health treatment is, we were to discover, one of the distinguishing features of the Chinese system.)
“‘The environment here is not like a jail,’ one of the doctors told us. ‘Patients engage in physical labor, cultural events and physical culture; and the medical staff works in urban and rural areas doing preventive work as well as attending inpatients.’ ‘The staff attempts to treat mental illness in rural areas and factories by teaching the masses about mental illness.’ ‘They also train factory doctors and barefoot doctors to treat people with mental disorders.’”
The situation described in Kristof’s Times column indicates how difficult it is for the severely mentally ill to even have access to mental health treatment in the form of needed medications, therapy, or inpatient care, let alone this type of community outreach and broad community support the Chinese built to help get the mentally ill stable enough to return to their families and to find help maintaining their health with the help of family members and comrades and the medical community in even the remote rural areas. Instead of criminalizing the mentally ill they helped train the society to recognize, assist in and support the full recovery of people with mental illness.
Another interesting and very salient point is that even people who committed crimes while suffering from mental illness would more often than not be transferred to the mental facilities and be released as the symptoms of their illness were brought under control. It was not seen as a crime to be mentally ill, and sentences would be commuted in such cases. Even the jailers were trained to recognize these symptoms and to quickly move people to situations where they could receive needed care rather than punishment! How does this stack up against the New Jim Crow, and Stop and Frisk, in which whole sections of people who have done nothing wrong, or at worst have drug-related, nonviolent offenses, get pipelined into prison because of the color of their skin?
So I then returned to the recent interview with Raymond Lotta, “You Don’t Know What You Think You ‘Know’ About... The Communist Revolution and the REAL Path to Emancipation: Its History and Our Future." In the section titled “Mobilizing the Masses to Transform All of Society,” he speaks to many of the ways that the Chinese people under the leadership of Mao Zedong and the Communist Party were mobilized in mass campaigns to tackle serious health problems: things like cholera and even opium addiction were conquered. One has to ask what is it that makes all this possible? The most essential answer to this lies in a new state power, and as Lotta says:
“The scourge of opium addiction was wiped out through mass treatment and education. People who had been addicted were now able to work productively...because a whole new economy based on meeting social need was established, including the ability to cultivate agricultural crops for the good of society. The most important thing, the most precious thing, was people and their ability to be healthy, to learn, to contribute.”
What are people, and human potential, to the system of capitalism-imperialism? Nothing more than commodities, and consumers of commodities, whose primary use is producing profit for the capitalist class. And as jobs are sent overseas, where labor is cheaper, more and more people, especially Black and Latino youth, are seen as useless, and their future foreclosed. Looking at the bleakness of all this must certainly exacerbate and even cause some forms of mental illness like serious clinical depression. For this system people who are “useless” can be dangerous. As Carl Dix has said, “They use Mass Incarceration as a form of counter insurgency before an insurgency has begun.” Under such a system, it should be no surprise at all that the mentally ill are criminalized, and that many who don’t fit in and don’t “go along to get along” are labeled “mentally ill.”
Even during the time, in the U.S., when the mentally ill were treated in health facilities, not jails, the facilities were more like jails, and the emphasis was placed on “normalcy,” not health. The goal was people who acted in ways that conformed to the social constraints of the times. People who were rebellious, women who had multiple sexual partners or children out of wedlock, youth who disobeyed their parents—all could be involuntarily committed and waste years of their lives locked away and drugged. Things like lobotomies were used to “tame” people, not cure them.
Looking back at the Chinese experience shows what has been and can be accomplished when the people have state power. Much of the work BA has done on the importance of the role of dissent, which is an important element of the new synthesis of communism that he has developed, gives us an even greater basis to quickly transform all of this. We can, on this basis, utilize science and the scientific method to develop treatments for mental illness that unlock human potential and build a world in which all of humanity can flourish.
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