Hello Everyone!

Darryl Dalrymple was not insane, despite the fact he was shot early this
morning holding a jagged piece of mirrored glass, and was about to try
attacking a group of heavily-armed police officers. Hell, he wasn't even
crazy, despite the fact that he had been kicked from mental health program
to clinic and back so many times his backside must have been a mass of boot
prints. So long as he continued to take his medication, one dose of which
would knock an elephant on its ass, he was "under treatment."

When he died of gunshot wounds, where were the mental health professionals
that had sentenced him to a life of misery and hysterical delusions? Where
was that young psychiatrist that reeked of Old Spice and cigar smoke when he
finally saw that Jesus Christ was actually Toto the dog, and went leaping
over the edge since it seemed there no longer was any hope? Where was the
sanitary white cots in the mental hospital, where they put you in a cage and
poked at your screaming, screeching psyche that constantly was on the border
of hell?

Everyone who ever tended to the needs of Dalrymple, a schitzophrenic with
uncontrollable delusions, were gone, for he wasn't insane. He was under
treatment.

No one wants anything to do with the number of mentally ill patients the eke
out hellish existences on the fringes of society. No, the Mental Health
Professionals whose job it is to represent and assist them lack the
resources, for Mental Health Professionals are far too few in number to
represent so many sick people at once, and their budgets have been
repeatedly cut to the point of near-insolvency. The politicians may make new
promises about how they are going to deal with the issues of mental illness
and homelessness, but that is just words prepared for them by a Spin Doctor
of lexicography.

Everyone, it seems, is in a state of vapid denial, for we are reassured
repeatedly that insanity simply does not exist outside the mental hospitals.
What we perceive as the insane are actually under treatment, and therefore
safe to be allowed to ramble the streets and byways of our nation,
unhindered, untreated and often victimized by the jackals of the street.

Everyone passes the buck, starting with the top government official in
charge of mental health services.

It is left up to the last person on the governmental mental health services
chain, the Police Department, to deal with societal jetsam, the mentally
ill, whether it is at four in the morning when a distraught woman is waving
a Bible and screaming at a mannikin in the window of a downtown department
store, a man is sitting on the corner of Howard and Riverside at rush hour
laughing hysterically as the rain pours down like a freshet or it is a
hopelessly delusional man armed with a piece of a broken mirror fighting
against imaginary ghouls and hellish beasts outside the bathroom door.

The politicaly-correct answer is that there is no insanity, outside the few
remaining mental health hospitals.

There is one exception.

If the police shoot a poor delusional creature, whose only sin against
society was that he was a schitzophrenic, then, in repose, he was insane. By
then, however, it was too late for treatment.

Rest in Peace, Darryl Dalrymple. You were the first victim of what Police
Chief Terry Mangled, himself a victim of delusions of sorts, gleefully
called a "Police Assisted Suicide".

I fear you will not be the last.

[Editors note: He wasn't. This was written in 1993 and there have been three
other "police-assisted suicides" since that time]

Comments anyone?

Dave

 * Origin: The Phoenix /The Used Kharma Lot BBS - (509)747-6207 (1:346/11)