Violence
A few days ago, I read in a newspaper about a person supposed to have killed and eaten a baby's face. The person is suspected to be mentally ill. At the same time, the news posted on schizophrenia.com "Schizophrenia NewsBlog" shows that 90% of the murderers in Sweden are mentally ill. I do not refute the fact that people with mental illness are a danger to society, for even I had had delusions and heard voices which, at one point of time made me decide to kill a few of my loved ones (though thankfully it never took place), but as this is an illness of the brain, and each brain is different, there are always exceptions to these cases. They may also be more than exceptions. We should, for example, try to find out the number of mentally ill people in a country, and the number of mentally ill people who committed acts of violence. I'm sure this ratio would be much smaller, if, and only if the number of mentally ill people have been diagnosed correctly and given adequate treatment. For a country with inadequate medical system and inadequate laws, the acts of violence will not stop. Even people who are not mentally ill can be stopped from carrying out acts of violence (healthy individuals do carry out acts of violence), if they are brought up in a non-dysfunctional environment. The perspective, the outlook of a person is affected greatly by the social environment he is exposed to, and thus, we can only stop acts of violence, drop crime rates, if we are a socially apt society, with adequate psychotherapy facilities and adequate laws, and adequate implementation of those laws. I believe that this is nowhere near a utopian outlook, and we can bring a change in the society, starting from within ourselves. Only when we are One with ourselves, can we be successful.
As I said earlier, I don't believe in death penalties, for violence doesn't stem from knowledge, rather, it stems from ignorance.
Posted by puzli at May 14, 2005 01:49 PM
