The Crime of Ignorance

To Paul Merrill, author of Monday’s column, “No Substitute for Cable: The crime of stupidity.” Your article yesterday was heartless, crude, and ignorant. We all know that infanticide is a horrible crime, exacerbated in this case by the fact that the perpertator was mentally ill, but your caustic treatment of a very, very sensitive issue reveals nothing but your own stupidity. Andrea Yates crime was to kill her children, not to be mentally ill, as you suggest. If you had read the entire Newsweek article you reference, you would have learned that not all schizophrenics hear “evil” voices. And that many can lead somewhat normal lives, often without anyone else knowing about their condition. True, it is almost impossible for a schizophrenic to distinguish between a real sound and a “voice,” but this has nothing to do with intelligence, or ability to recognize the illness, but rather the chemical anomalies that cause the illness in the first place. Schizophrenia causes the neuro-connections that we experience as fleeting thoughts, or stream of conciousness, to be experienced as coming from outside the brain. I doubt many people can deny having random thoughts that seem completely contrary to all logic or morality, but To Andrea Yates, these thoughts were experienced as voices telling her to do things. Her evident depression, whether it was post-partum or life-long clinical depression, intensified her illness and gave her voices the satanic bent we so love to read about. These facts alone do not make her a criminal. If they did, then one out of every four people, (the statistic counting incidence of clinical depression in America), should be behind bars. Russel Yates crime, if he did commit one, was not ignorance, for his refusal to keep “those five poor children away from their mother,” but undstanding that mental illness should not be a stigma. He wanted to keep his wife a part of the family, he wanted to help her live with her illness, in the role of a normal mother. He understood, that a mentally ill person can lead a normal life, and be stronger for it. Obviously in this case it did not work out, and I am certainly glad I was not on that jury in Houston, because there are many more moral questions here than meet the eye. But thank you, Paul, for illustrating one of them: how can we live with and pass judgement on the menally ill, without belying our prejudices against them? Asshole. Much love, Katharine Keenan CAS 2004 Kakeen@bu.edu, campus phone: 5-6244