Often schizophrenics' emotions are strikingly inappropriate to
what's going on around them. "These inappropriate emotions produce one of
the most dramatic aspects of the disease--the victim suddenly breaking
out in cackling laughter for no apparent reason;' writes Torrey. One
patient told him, "It must look queer to people when I laugh about
something that has nothing to do with what I am talking about, but they
don't know what's going on inside and how much of it is running round in
my head. You see I might be talking about something quite serious to you
and other things come into my head at the same time that are funny and
this makes me laugh." Eventually, though, the emotions of schizophrenics
tend to flatten as the disease progresses, so much so that Torrey tells
of one patient who set his house on fire and then sat down serenely to
watch TV.
As serious a medical illness as schizophrenia is, thousands of
psychologists, social workers, and even psychiatrists cling to the myth,
popularized in the 1960s, that schizophrenia is caused by "bad mothers"
or "crazy families."
Such was apparently the view of psychologist A.P. Tadajewski,
Ph.D., to whom Mark's mother took him at a local child guidance clinic
beginning in the summer of 1978. "He wanted to know about the
relationship between Mark and us, to find a reason for the behavior," she
says. "We were made to think it was our fault. I told him, 'Hey, what are
we going to do? This can't go on.' And he said, 'Mark's very rebellious.
He has a lot of anger.' I don't even know if this man knew what
schizophrenia was."
On the night of Friday, September 1, 1978, the family had some
friends over and by 10 o'clock, two of Mark's sisters were walking a
neighbor home. Mark's mother and her husband, Patti Hicks, had just gone
into their bedroom when Paul said, 'Hey, where is my Baretta?" The gun
case on the bedroom wall, he noticed, was missing one of the shotguns he
used for hunting. "I don't know," said Mark's mother. "Mark's been home
all day. Maybe he knows."
She walked across the hall and knocked on Mark's door, closed as
usual. When no answer came, she opened it and found him lying in the
darkness. She walked over to his bedside lamp to switch it on, but the
lamp remained dark. Mark fumbled with it and knocked it onto the floor.
As she stooped down to pick it up, she saw Mark rising from the bed with
something in his hands. Suddenly three gunshots broke the silence. She
turned to see her husband in the doorway fall with three wounds to the
chest.
"I just stood there," Mark's mother recalls, her voice shaking with
sobs. "I didn't know what to do. I didn't scream. I just closed my eyes
and thought, 'I'm dreaming this. I'll wake up in a minute.' Then I opened
my eyes and Paul was just lying there."
Realizing she needed to get the Baretta, she quietly yet firmly
said to her son, "Mark, give me the gun." She reached toward him, he
pulled back, and then he handed it over.
After calling the police, she went back to her husband as he lay on
the floor, gasping for air. By midnight, Paul was dead. Eight hours
later, after hiding out all night from police and neighbors, Mark was
found curled up under shrubbery next door, and arrested.
The official line from schizophrenia researchers and foundations is
that schizophrenics are no more violent on average than ordinary people.
And surely it would be an injustice to perpetuate the groundless fears
that many people have of the seriously mentally ill. Most schizophrenics,
in fact, are said to become passive, listless, nearly mute. Of those who
do become violent, most become their own victims: fully one of 10
schizophrenics die at their own hands.
Even so, in a three-month investigation including interviews with
over 100 people across the country and visits to homes and institutions
in Wisconsin, Florida, Louisville, New York, and New Jersey, it was
impossible to find a parent living at home with a schizophrenic child who
wasn't afraid of him or her.
"I think the national leadership greatly underestimates the level
of violence," says Barbara Rankin, forensic coordinator for the Kentucky
Alliance for the Mentally Ill and a member of the forensics committee of
the national alliance. "They think the violence adds to the stigma. But I
don't know of one family in my support group in Lexington whose
schizophrenic children don't get violent when they're delusional. I can't
think of anyone who hasn't had at least very real threats--and usually
worse than that. With appropriate treatment, they're no more dangerous
than other people. But untreated, you never know."
Rankin's schizophrenic son, James, was in and out of mental
hospitals three times in the year leading up to June of 1985. Even then,
though, no law required him to continue taking his medications once he
was back home, and soon he was talking about killing Rankin's second
husband. On June 27, 1985, James walked out to his truck, picked up a
compound bow and arrow, came into the kitchen and shot her husband
through the heart. He was found "guilty but mentally ill" on charges of
manslaughter, and is now serving a 10-year prison sentence.
Tags:
caliber rifle,
culvert,
deinstitutionalization,
drainage ditches,
empty train,
ford pickup,
ford pickup truck,
insulated coverall,
mark daniel,
mental hospitals,
mental illness,
psychiatric illness,
public shelters,
red ford,
sallee,
schizophrenia,
school bus,
sporting goods store,
thestreets,
train car,
treatment,
violence,
waitress,
wooded area
