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What We Still Get Wrong About Mental Illness and Violence
And why the truth matters now more than ever —for fair policing, and for us all
Last March, a 41-year-old man named Daniel Prude traveled from his home in Chicago to visit his brother in Rochester. One night, he darted out of his brother’s place, wearing no shoes and no shirt. Someone called 911, saying they saw a man running in the street and shouting that he had the coronavirus.
When the police came, they saw what seemed by all accounts to be a delirious man, sitting in the middle of the street. They had no problem handcuffing him. But when he bristled at being confined, spitting and trying to stand up, the police training seemed to kick in. They draped a mesh hood over his head and pinned him on the ground, face down; then they pushed his head to the pavement.
Then they kept pushing. For two minutes.
Then he stopped breathing.
Medics resuscitated Daniel Prude, but he died at the hospital a week later. And last month, a grand jury failed to indict the police who killed him. And here, from the Daily News, comes the punch line — one that by now we all ought to be pretty used to:
“His family says he suffered from mental health issues.”
I know I promised you some hope in my last post. But there’s a major issue hanging over every discussion of mental illness — and was of particular concern to me when I was reporting and writing Hidden Valley Road, my book about one family with six cases of schizophrenia. That subject is violence.
This week, I called Xavier Amador, a psychologist who is perhaps the most prominent authority on “anosognosia,” or the inability to understand that you are mentally ill. Amador’s TEDx talk about anosognosia — featuring the story of how he found a way to connect with his own brother, who suffered from schizophrenia and never believed he was ill — has helped thousands understand the challenges anyone can face in getting a severely mentally ill person to accept help. His LEAP Institute offers a handy method for engaging with delusional people in a non-confrontational way (and since Hidden Valley Road was published, Lindsay Galvin Rauch, the youngest of the twelve Galvin…
