Shades of Tom Sell

This is still at the top of the Daily Kenn as I write this.

Notice this happened in California.  After the Nutbar of Tucson did what he did, the national media profiled California’s schizophrenia public health program.  It is funded with the proceeds of a relatively small top marginal tax rate on high income earners, and at least if the national media are to be believed, it has a good track record, and the program’s trust fund is so healthy that politicians are looking to dip into it.

I could imagine Mr. Dewitt was a beneficiary of this program.

Here’s the interesting part:

Photos on the wall of his bedroom show a boy who loved to fish with his dad. The son of Alameda’s first African-American city councilman, the late Al Dewitt, Daniel played football at Alameda High School and was headed for college when he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic at age 18.

“Our system is such that they go in, they shove them full of all kinds of antipsychotics and put them back out on the street again,” said the suspect’s mother.

Candy Dewitt said she saw her son the day before the attack and that there was no indication he was violent. However, she said he had been getting worse since July after trying to medicate himself not with drugs, which he hated, but with a healthy diet and exercise.

“What needs to change in our system is people need to be made to take meds before they get to this point,” said Candy Dewitt.

Yeah, sure, that will go over well.  It’s not as if Mr. Dewitt was totally out in space, because he did realize that he had a problem, but he wanted to take a non-pharmacological tack to mitigating it.  And of course the system is designed to give paranoid schizophrenics the requisite drugs then set them free.  That’s the point — The drugs are meant to straighten out your brain so you can function as a competent adult in an open society, in as much is there is any competency or openness left.  Do you really think we want to confine Mr. Dewitt to 100 or so square feet for the rest of his life when there are easier and more humane alternatives?

Of course, now that he’s facing a murder rap, a hundred square feet will be the extent of his personal latitude for the rest of his life.