The holidays are upon us, and by now you have already read about a spate of domestic, school, and political homicides. Apparently, not everyone is profiting from the Wall Street-driven economy. Such events are a helpful reminder that the have-nots are to be reckoned with by the haves. Shrugging your shoulders isn't acceptable if a victim was your relative, and wholesale civil commitment is unfair to the despairing. The solution lies—in part—outside of psychiatry. Somewhere, right now, a disenfranchised industrial worker—whose unemployment compensation ran out months ago, whose dreams of a comfortable life long ago were deported to a low-wage, low-cost factory in Mexico, who had three hungry young kids he can't afford to feed, and a wife he disappointed—will bring death home for the holidays. No one will be surprised, for the descent is slow but inexorable, the doom palpable, the weapons available.
Somewhere else, the carols and the delightful chirps of children's business will be halted by the sickening putt-putt of one of their classmate's guns, as he suddenly attacks his homeroom on a day not unlike any other. Merry Christmas to none. The entire community will be traumatized, and the school administration haunted by its relative powerlessness to prevent such destruction.
In Virginia, the families of Jacob Chestnut and John Gibson will pass through the holidays like Hondurans in Hurricane Mitch. Chestnut and Gibson were the Capitol police officers killed by Russell Weston, an Indiana native who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
What do these crimes have in common? The loss of life and the trauma fallout from these killings constitute even more of a danger to the citizens of this country than domestic terrorism now prioritized. And the perpetrators are not only quite disturbed, they are unreachable by conventional mental health channels.
Contending with bizarre letters from the most remote corners of the earth is nothing new to the Secret Service. Agents find that the authors of these rambling, vituperative notes are often barely able to organize themselves to live independently, and ultimately engender more pathos than fear. And then, someone like Russell Weston actually pulls it together enough to make it to Washington to carry out a tragic, if aborted a, attack at the Capitol. Published Justice Department statistics indicate unauthorized intruders on White House property to be very frequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. So, even as recent medical literature shows that the incidence of violence in the mentally ill, without substance dependence, approaches the rate of others in the community, clearly there is a subset of those who endanger public figures. This is no new to the Secret Service, which considers itself, not psychiatry, to be on the front lines of protecting government figures. It Included Weston, albeit lowly ranked, on a list of people considered a potential threat to the President. But even if the Secret Service takes the Westons of America more seriously, what can it do?
Corporate security has emerged as the first line of defense against workplace mass homicide. However, in-house security priorities are to the corporation, which means the toxin they eliminate from the company may be destructive somewhere else. And as research further delineates the psychiatric risk factors for mass school homicide and domestic murder-suicide, we will come to better understand how to identify people at high risk to carry out these catastrophes. But who will protect the public?
Let the Secret Service and the FBI develop a domestic intelligence plan for reaching out, supportively, to the isolated psychotics and paranoid loners identified as threats to many others—and yes, threats to national security. Agents as outreach workers? You'd better believe it.
It shouldn't be too hard, or expensive, for domestic intelligence to coordinate with various different state and local mental health agencies to provide a tailored outreach for reducing the isolation of potential threats. Who better to find a way to connect to the overwhelmed and withdrawn pre-homicidal parent or employee than the "stranger" he meets in a bar? And what about arranging for the "cool guy who just moved in on Front Street" to befriend the Satanic, morbid and rapidly sinking sixteen year old?
The cost? Well, if we can fund a search effort for Eric Rudolph involving hundred of men, and for months, we can find an ATF connected or supervised buddy to find his way to the next malcontent looking for his own Dr. Barnett Slepian. 1984? Nobody said anything about interfering with persons' lives, or taking them into custody There already are, and will continue to be, far more sinister and intrusive forms of national security surveillance.
Nothing defuses a potential time bomb wrestling with wildly irrational ideas faster than a benign human presence. The person, adolescent or adult, who feels alienated from, and even endangered by everyone, is that person who walks into a strange place and just starts shooting. That is the nature of paranoia. A calming, consistent outreach worker can test strange beliefs and talk someone down from an idea at least to the extent that he won't act upon it.
This is how domestic cloak and dagger work can quietly protect us all. No one has to get hurt. Only the spook can move as quickly, carefully, and quietly as an angel. Only someone as caring and mercurial as an angel can approach the unapproachable. And in the universe of the resentful, paranoid, and alienated, only the caring have the power to disarm. May the holidays bring out the angel in all of us.
