How Many of the Mentally Ill are Really in Prisons, Exactly?

Hi Darby and Uprising,

This is a challenge I thnk we all face all day every day in all of our dialogues, blog posts and reporting. I won’t try to speak for anyone else, but here’s my challenge: If I was strict about this, I would be putting virtually every second word in “quotes”. The terms “mental health” and “normal” and “average” and “not mentally ill” are laden with assumptions, too (And let’s not forget, there are some people who argue quite eloquently that perhaps in some ways “everyone” is indeed “mentally ill” because our society is fundamentally “sick”.). Many people find “consumer” or “survivor” offensive, while others embrace one of those labels but rarely both. Some would call themselves “patients” or “ex-patients”, while others find even the implied suggestion of a person with an illness being treated to be offensive. The words “schizophrenia” and “psychotic” carry very powerful, often negative connotations. Do antidepressant drugs actually have proven “anti-depressant” qualities, or should that word also be in quotes? How about “antipsychotics”? The word “criminal” also has both a literal, factual dimension (‘person who has been found guilty of a crime under a jurisdiction’s laws’) and a very derogatory one, so one could reasonably argue that word should always be in quotes, too.

In practical terms, all of that becomes difficult to manage in the context of putting out multiple stories every day. So the ‘rule’ I tend to go with is, when I’m trying to reasonably neutrally summarize or report on someone else’s writing, I tend to use the terms that writer used. If they put something in quotes, then I usually do. If they did not, then I do not. Sometimes, it may not be immediately obvious, so I might try to understand if the writer seems to be raising particular terms or ideas into question or not, and then make my own decision from there about how to summarize it. Or if the particular context for the word or label seems particularly unusually inflammatory, then that may prompt me to put it in quotes regardless. If you read a lot of my articles, you may notice that I frequently write “people diagnosed with…” as opposed to “people with…”, but the reality is, that too becomes difficult to manage in pithy headlines or grammatical sentence structures and I start to wonder if it really makes any fundamental difference to most readers. Besides, “diagnose” also implies illness, and so others would suggest going with “labeled with…”; however, writing “people labeled as having mental illnesses” is a phrase that would make many “ordinary” readers immediately doubt the “neutrality” of the author…

In the case of this particular headline, I think Uprising’s alternative is good. However, 1 Boring Old Man does use the term mental illness without quotes. And I also felt that putting the headline in the frame of a question, and noting that 1 Boring Old Man’s articles were fundamentally questioning all the methodologies at work, sufficiently flagged that ‘all may not be as it seems in the world of mental disorders and criminals.’

None of this is excusing myself of anything, by the way. Just an explanation, for your interest. It’s a delicate balancing act for all of us, trying to communicate effectively with a broad readership about these complex, highly sensitive issues.

Thanks for reading!

Rob

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“If psychiatry had its way all of humanity would be considered mentally ill and there fore more to drug.”

That is the case where I live. Every single person in my State is considered to have a mental illness by the definition in our Mental Health Act. Saves a whole bunch of problems for mental health workers when they want to lock someone up and drug them. Matter of degree, not kind that way. It then becomes a matter of separating out who poses the greatest risk to self or other. Anyone with a negligence claim against a doctor goes straight to the top of the list lol.

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