If a schoolchild overturns a desk during an epileptic seizure and it hits a classmate and breaks that student’s foot, no one demands that the child with epilepsy be put into juvenile detention and punished. However, if that schoolchild has a mental illness and accidentally overturns a desk, injuring someone, that child is sent before a juvenile court judge for punishment because of his/her actions.
This observation came from Summit County Juvenile Court Judge Linda Tucci Teodosio who spoke last Friday during a Mental Health and Criminal Justice Symposium held in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. I gave the symposium’s keynote address.
Judge Teodosio’s point was that our society views mental illnesses differently from other physical illnesses and frequently holds persons with severe mental illnesses responsible for getting sick.
On the same afternoon that Judge Teodosio was speaking, police officers in Montgomery County, Maryland, responded to a nuisance call in Gaithersburg, a suburb of Washington D.C.. A 51 year old man was standing in the bed of a truck yelling profanities and hitting the vehicle with rocks. When he did not obey the officer’s commands, the police sprayed him with pepper gas and then shot him with Tasers. The man stopped breathing and was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
