Ilyka Damen is one of those people I read all the time but never link. Her latest post deserves link love, though (however unfortunate the surrounding circumstances):

Can we just for once admit we don’t know everything there is to know, not even a tiny fraction of what we need to know, about the crazy? We’re as bad as people in the Middle Ages were about the plague. Maybe someday the crazy will also turn out to be caused by something as simple as bacteria; I kind of doubt that, but I’m not ruling it out.

My point is, we’re only a tiny step up from sending for the parish priest to perform an exorcism; we still have largely no idea how to fix this level of crazy, the “pardon me I have to go shoot my grandad now” sort of crazy. We have counselors and psychiatrists and psychologists and evaluation teams and social workers and medications and treatment plans and rehabilitation centers–but even with all that, every so often the crazy wins one. And it’s always tragic when it does, but scapegoating Prozac, bad films, and chat rooms doesn’t get us any closer to fixing the crazy.

Americans have a real problem with this. Actually, with these, because it’s two issues:

1. Some problems can be identified but not fixed.
2. Some problems can be identified but not traced to a comprehensive set of finite sources.

One of our most endearing traits is the belief that everyone is redeemable and that there’s always a second chance, but, like anything else, it can be taken to an extreme. There are plain wrong-‘uns in the world. It’s a shame that it has to be that way, given all the resources and goodwill we have available to help people, but it’s something we may never be able to solve.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 27th, 2005 at 07:23 and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.