A link to the following essay was posted on the FB page of Families for Treatment of Serious Mental Illness months ago. Unfortunately, the horror this Pennsylvania family experienced is all too common, predictable, and avoidable. These tragedies are products of well-defined choices that legislators and agencies of government have made to drive people afflicted with Schizophrenia and other tragic neuropsychiatric disorders into prisons, where they can be mistreated and forgotten by society. Legislators have designed failure very consciously by ignoring the truth about what can happen when a human being becomes neurologically detached from reality i.e. psychosis. Psychosis is a neurological condition that can make bad things happen to good people but The Law and Criminal Justice have chosen to deny this – so that innately good people can be criminalized.  (a cautionary note: to the reader who might find “knowing right from wrong” in this story.  This is why juries and judges wrongly convict.  They do not understand how this disease works.  The utterings of a person afflicted with thought disorder, confabulation, anosognosia, clinical delusion, and consciousness disorder cannot be processed through normal modes of reasoning and evaluation, i.e. they should not be interpreted through a presumption of sanity – a legal construct)

A Family Tragedy – That Could Have Been Avoided