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Schizophrenia and Institutional Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2015

J. Ernest Keen
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Extract

One of the ironies in perceiving schizophrenics as violent is that they are the recipients of more violence than practically any of the rest of us. To lock someone up in a mental hospital, to pass electricity through their cranium until they are stupefied, to give them drugs that cure symptoms the way alcohol cures sobriety, to give them a label that will forever prejudice nearly everyone against them—these are the most common versions of our violence against those we call schizophrenic. In spite of the elaborate science and rhetoric about how all this is to help them to recover, nothing is so obvious in how we treat them as our fear, contempt, and most of all, our resulting neglect of them, and their continuing vulnerability.

This is not to deny that those we call “schizophrenic” are confused. Indeed, they are engaging a spiritual struggle that overwhelms them, and may well have done so for many years. It is an underlying suspicion of this chapter that their spiritual struggle is one of the central reasons we are so violent toward them.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , 1996 , pp. 57 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 1987

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