Mental Illness: Disease or Not?

Mental Illness isn't by any means a new Illness in our society. For as long as there has been a human race there have been mental illnesses. Mental Illness is any disease of the mind; the psychological state of someone's mind that has emotional or behavioral problems that are serious enough to require psychiatric and/or medical intervention on their behalf. Andrea Yates by no means should have ever been sent to prison for what she did, she was and obviously still is too sick to have known what she was doing!

This woman has had a long history of mental illnesses and was ignored by many people in the health care profession, including her own doctor. She was taken off of her medication against her will as well as her husband and others who felt that it would be detrimental to her and people around her. It turned out to be a fact of the matter, just a little too late, therefore the system had to blame someone for this atrocity therefore they blamed the mentally ill mother of these poor children. This case is one of the most egregious mentally ill cases I've ever heard of in history, or my lifetime. Society has never been fair in how they think about mental illness, which is a disease, and people who suffer from it have no control over it.

Therefore how can you hold someone responsible for something that they can't control? This falls right in line with many other things that doesn't have a cut and dried answer for situations in society. In some places in America it seems as though Law enforcement has began to deal with the mentally ill in inhumane ways, it seem as though some officers arrive on the scene of a situation where it's obviously that the person that they are dealing with isn't stable. Yet they end up killing this person for making what they refer to as threatening gestures on the part of the ill person. I find this unacceptable because if a wild animal can be subdued by being tranquilized then why not do the same for human beings?

Yours truly,
La Tonya Powell