At the start of this year, a nine-year-old girl was shot and killed in Tucson by a young man some speculate might have schizophrenia. He also shot 11 other people, five of whom died. The intended victim was Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. She had just won a punishingly nasty election campaign during which she was put in the website crosshairs for destruction by some supporters of the Tea Party. The question must therefore be asked if the shooter’s delusional thinking was triggered by the political storm surrounding the election.
Currently, Arizona has 21,000 people with untreated schizophrenia, according to estimates from the National Institute of Mental Health. About 10 per cent can be expected to become violent at some time or other. Thus the argument has been made that the motivation for this killing, as with other political assassinations by mentally distressed individuals, is based on psychotic delusions ideation and not political thinking,
If this is the case, the lesson to be learned is that mental health public policies have failed. The development of antipsychotic drugs in the 1960s allowed the discharge of most people who were institutionalized for severe mental health illnesses. The ensuing decades saw a failure to provide supportive community-based health care that has led, in the U.S., to filling prisons with mentally ill citizens. Today, 45 per cent of federal prisoners have mental health disorders, according to the U.S. Justice Department. The numbers are even higher in state and local jails. And 10 per cent of the 16,000 annual murders in the U.S. are committed by people with serious mental illnesses. So, maybe one positive outcome of this preventable tragedy will be a wake up call to politicians to do something more than just building more jail cells.
But then why would the shooter have chosen to kill a politician? Why not his mailman, a local policeman, his pastor or another member of his own family? Surely there is another message involved. One that points the finger to a societal ill.
America is a most extraordinary country where freedom of speech, individual liberty and the constitutional right to carry firearms in public has placed the rights of the individual above citizenship responsibility for respect for those whose ideas and needs differ from one’s own — singly or for society. And this competition for supremacy and the importance in winning has been one of the reasons that the U.S. way of life has been so dominant globally for more than a century.
But something has gone wrong. I think it started with George Bush Sr. who declared the beginning of a new world order when he was president. His son brought it to a new height when his administration dominated the political landscape for eight years with disrespectful, demeaning insults and a world view that those who were not with him were, a priori, against him. This campaign of intimidation has been so successful in the U.S. field of political battles, that athletes and coaches, media owners and commentators, advertising and corporate executives have shifted from a spirit of healthy competition of skills and ideas to derisive nastiness, incivility, rudeness and aggressiveness to the point that it has become pervasive.
And why has this been allowed to flourish? Because it works. In America, vitriolic negativism wins votes and unbridled insulting media personalities become rich and popular. Violence in sports brings out the crowds and TV sponsors.
The tragedy of it all is that America is now exporting the seeds of toxic, unpredictable political environments. Canada is a fertile country for this type of approach. Parliamentary Question Period is a gong show of insulting behaviours — bereft of eloquence or politeness. And we are now seeing it in upcoming election strategies in magnified form. Attack ads and negative campaigning have been introduced as the underpinnings of the federal Conservative Party election campaign in Quebec. Personal attacks will follow elsewhere in Canada, particularly for those unfortunate NDP members of Parliament who dared vote in favour of retaining the long-gun registry. Whether the Liberals will follow suit is uncertain.
We are at great risk of losing our capacity for feeling horrified and embarrassed mutual respect and tolerance in public life has become boring and unfashionable. We are prepared to see good people badly hurt for our political entertainment.
And then we wonder why school bullies are often very popular with their schoolmates.
Alan Murdock is a local pediatrician.
