This nation needs to consider and act on psychologist Jonathan Kellerman’s devastating historical and ideological critique of the reigning liberationist/libertarian view, born in the “Love-In era,” “that no matter how bizarre, disabling or life-threatening a person’s hallucinations and delusions, involuntary treatment was never called for” – which he says largely explains why the Virginia Tech shooter was not committed.
Writing in Opinion Journal, Kellerman makes a convincing case for protective incarceration in certain cases. But most interesting is his sense of the decadence that underlies our society’s false sense of security, as manifest in its unwillingness to lock away dangerous mental patients. “Because in our well-intentioned quest to maximize personal liberty,” he says, “we’ve moved conceptual eons away from taking the concept of dangerousness seriously.”