Nikolas Cruz and “Mental Healthâ€: A Brief Analysis Posted by Jack Kerwick
As always happens in the wake of a mass shooting, last week when Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 people at his former Florida high school, commentators spared not a moment to take to the airwaves to bemoan the government’s alleged inattentiveness to the issue of “mental health†or “mental illness.â€
And Republicans, i.e. self-described conservatives, were at least as prone as their liberal Democratic counterparts to offer this response.
Few people think through the implications of this line—yet there are many.
First, it is telling that the proponents of “limited government†and “personal accountability†should lament what they evidently think is a failure on the part of the federal government to be sufficiently aggressive in tampering with the minds of its citizens.
Second, the federal government has already spent, and continues to spend, billions of dollars—all taxpayers’ monies, bear in mind—on “mental health†services. Yet “conservative†Republicans don’t think that the Therapeutic State is expansive enough.
Third, those who insist upon identifying “mental health†as the cause, or at least a cause, of mass shootings, usually do so only with respect to: (a) a certain class of mass shootings—school shootings; and (b) a certain class of shooters—young, predominantly white, school shooters.
When suspected Islamic terrorists drive a truck into a crowd, fly jets into skyscrapers, or shoot up a military installation, there is remarkably little said about the “mental health†challenges of the perpetrators. When non-white gangbangers, irrespectively of their ages, or organized criminals of any ethnicity or age commit atrocities, no one talks about “mental health.â€
This is telling, for what it suggests is that like, say, “climate change†and “gun-control,†the elasticity of the term “mental health†may very well be the product of design, providing as it does a justification for the potentially limitless centralization of government authority and equally limitless consolidation of government power over every facet of the lives of its citizens.
For the social engineer who aches to fundamentally transform society, the concept of “mental health†is indispensable. Yet it’s also invaluable inasmuch as its immense broadness permits the engineer to exploit it as selectively as the political circumstances demand: Since public sensibilities (at least at present) promise to be offended by the suggestion that the 9/11 hijackers, ISIS, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and mob hitmen are “mentally ill,†the engineer can simply cast his net elsewhere, toward the Adam Lanzas and Nikolas Cruzes of the world.
There are still yet other disturbing implications of the concept of “mental health†or “mental illness.â€
To assign “mental illness†as the “cause†of criminality, whether the crime in question is theft, arson, assault, or murder, is to divest the act of all moral value, positive and negative. In short, if we’re going to insist that a person was “caused†by his “mental illness†to, for example, go on a shooting spree at a school, then it is no longer possible for us to condemn that person and his acts as immoral, much less as evil.
The realms of “mental health/illness†and morality are mutually incommensurable: The language of the one cannot be translated into that of the other.
snip
http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/attheintersectionoffaithandculture/2018/02/nikolas-cruz-mental-health-brief-analysis.html
