psychosis

I was just thinking this morning about Vince Li, the individual who beheaded a sleeping passenger on a Greyhound bus almost a year ago now. As one YouTube member said, "As usual, a crime of this nature is an excuse for every frustrated racist and sadistic creep to come out of the woodwork demanding the death penalty, the repeal of gun control, stricter immigration laws and the right to lynch and torture."

That being said, I forgive you if you can't look past your feelings of disgust and aversion. With rumours swirling around Li being released, it's only natural to be worried.

This is the way I see it. Morally, nobody should get away with murder. Taking a life is taking a life, regardless of whether you are psychologically fit or not. We can all agree on the fact that killing someone, whether by beheading or by death penalty, is killing all the same. This is why I feel that a death penalty for Li is just as atrocious a response and is not remotely to be considered an effective solution. Having a tit-for-tat mentality in this case is not morally justified.

We cannot, however, simply turn the other cheek and let Li get away unscathed. A murder deserves punishment, which I presume would be a long term sentence in a secure facility with a strictly regimented day of activities - isolation and the removal of freedom. While this obviously doesn't seem like justice, we are essentially bestowing the harshest of punishments we can offer without exceeding moral boundaries. If we don't follow what makes us distinctly human, even in moments where our moral line is questioned, what separates us from purely killing for fun? We would be traipsing down the path towards ethical anarchy.

Furthermore, we should also attempt to rehabilitate Li, because leaving him there to rot is cruel. Naturally, our first instinct is to bubble up with emotion and do as the victim's aunt did, exclaiming "Hey, Vince, rot in hell, you filthy bastard!" But out of the goodness of our own heart, out of the fact that life is about love however cliché that may seem, out of the idea that almost all religions and moral imperatives seem to come to the conclusion that love is an ideal, it seems like the way to go is to give Li a smattering of forgiveness. We cannot forgive that he committed murder, and I'm not suggesting we should, but we should allow him the chance to recover from his psychiatric affliction.

Why am I so interested in psychiatry? Because psychiatry is the fool's department of medicine, the branch of health care that is ridiculed for its patients (who are 'looneys' and 'wackjobs') and its lack of results. Very few psychiatric patients become "fully cured", most turn out zombies or relapse within a very short time. Psychiatric illnesses are lifelong afflictions with unknown organic origins, so it's so easy to assume these people are pretending, and that they could just behave like the rest of the world and "snap out of it" if they wanted to. This is the mysterious branch of illness, and so we have so much to learn about helping these patients.

Schizophrenia is very real, and the most difficult thing to realize is that these individuals do not see the world as we do. One of the defining features of psychosis according to the DSM is that there be an element of not being attached to this world, whether it be hallucinations or delusions or bizarre behaviour; essentially, their reality must be altered in a way we cannot understand. They see demons and alternate universes, imagine they have physical goat horns growing out of their heads, perceive God's voice upon their tympanum. These individuals are sick in a way that is both disturbing and impossible for us to grasp.

Such is Li's crutch, but it is not his excuse. Li should be detained indefinitely, and should adhere to a regime of social and environmental rehabilitation. We should also allow him meds and therapy in the effort to return him to as normal a state of mind as he can become. If Li shows promise in the long term, especially because schizophrenia shows only a 20% chance of a good prognosis, he must be closely monitored at all times if he does return to society, so that he adheres to his drug schedule and that his integration is both safe to him and safe to the public.

I feel that forgiveness means mercy, but it does not excuse going beyond moral boundaries. Law should be there so that people may take the insanity defense if a psychiatric or neurological illness exists, but that its repercussions would cause anyone else to avoid it under any other circumstance.