My Support Forums - View Single Post - DJ Jaffe and the Treatment Advocacy Center

spiritual_emergency · Mar 06, 2010 at 09:39 PM

A few days later, Mr. Jaffe posted a link to another article he'd written. I was surprised to note that this one was posted at a site that contained this banner: FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS: Engaging American Families in our Nation's Security. I wondered, 'Since when was schizophrenia a matter of national security?' and then began to read through the article...

Quote:

Exclusive: Save Lives – Changes to Involuntary Commitment Laws Needed - DJ Jaffe

This week:
•A Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania woman who sliced the baby from the wombof a teenager and then killed the mother was found guilty but mentally ill.
•In Bloomington Illinois, a man accused of fatally bludgeoning his 14-month-old daughter with a baseball bat was determined to be mentally unfit to stand trial.
•In St. Paul, Minnesota, a grocery store worker was randomly stabbed by someone with schizophrenia. He told police he chose his victim because he was male.

While most mentally ill individuals are not violent, those who have very serious illnesses and are not receiving treatment are more violent as a group than the general population.

Their victims are most often themselves (5,000 a year kill themselves). The second most likely victims are family members. According to a 1994 Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report – "Murder in Families" – of parents killed by children, 25.1 percent of defendants had a history of untreated mental illness

Currently the law in many states prevents inpatient commitment until after the person with mental illness becomes “danger to self or others.” That’s absurd. Laws should help prevent violence, not require it.

The effort to change laws is being led, not surprisingly, by those who care more about the mentally ill than public safety: the parents and families of the ill. For them, reform of involuntary treatment laws can help their loved ones survive safely, lead semi-normal lives, and avoid the homelessness, incarceration, and victimization that pervade the lives of many with untreated, serious mental illness.

However, the parents have made little headway. The fact is, no one wants to reform laws to help the mentally ill other than their families. It’s hard to get up a head of sympathy for people living under seven layers of lice-infected clothing and eating out of dumpsters on the city streets.

But more recently, stories like the woman who sliced a baby from the womb, the father who bludgeoned his 14-month-old daughter, and the clerk who was randomly stabbed have brought new advocates to the party: those concerned about public safety...

Source: The Aforementioned National Security Site

I was curious about that 5000 people figure so I clicked on that link too. It lead to a page from the Treatment Advocacy Center -- pay careful attention to the wording...

Quote:

The only major study of psychosis and suicide was done in St. Louis, 1956–1957. During one year, 134 individuals committed suicide, and 19 percent of them had symptoms of psychosis (mostly delusions) in the month preceding their suicide...

If that percentage, admittedly conservative, was true in 1999, then 19 percent of the 29,199 completed suicides, or 5,548 individuals who committed suicide in 1999, were psychotic at the time they committed suicide.

The conclusions reached by both sets of analysis are thus consistent:
At least 5,000 individuals who commit suicide each year are psychotic at the time of their suicide.

Source: TAC: Suicide

There are so many problems with that statement I don't even know where to begin. To start with, there are certainly more current studies related to mental illness and suicide (I'll post some of those in a minute).

Secondly, the data was arrived at by speculation -- If that percentage, admittedly conservative, was true in 1999...

Third, did anyone else happen to catch that in the initial article Jaffe stated that 5000 of the "mentally ill" kill themselves. The implication is that he's drawn his data from a pool that includes all known classes of mental illness -- depression, Apserger's, anxiety disorders, etc. However, by the time we get to his source, those "5000 suicides" have all become the territory of the "psychotic".

I noted then that I wasn't feeling the love and had begun to seriously doubt any claims to advocacy.