Punishment not cure for mental illness
Alex Hribal, 17, has been held in a juvenile detention facility in Westmoreland County since April 9, when he went to his Murrysville school with two kitchen knives, slashing 20 students and a security guard before he was subdued. Few doubt he was deranged at the time of his rampage, and there’s little question that his mental state is any better now. A court-appointed psychiatrist said Hribal suffers from a depressive disorder and is probably schizophrenic. He reportedly believed other students could read his thoughts and was channeling the Columbine High School killers.
A Westmoreland County judge ordered Hribal to be transferred to Southwood Psychiatric Hospital in Upper St. Clair, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, but the hospital, which bills itself as the region’s only behavioral health hospital solely for children and adolescents, said Monday it will not treat the boy after all, citing security concerns.
It’s not the first private mental hospital to decline to treat Hribal, and his attorney, Patrick Thomassey, is exasperated. He said the teen needs daily contact with a mental health specialist and group therapy.
“I think they should be ashamed of themselves,” Thomassey told a KDKA television reporter. “I mean, this young man needs some help, some psychiatric therapy and I can’t find a place to take him and I think that’s pathetic. Alex is no more of a security threat than you are. I’d take him home with me if the judge would let him.”
Years ago, before the state shuttered most of its mental hospitals, Hribal could have received the treatment he needs while being held safely apart from society. He might have been confined at Mayview State Hospital, which occasionally treated violent adolescents. In closing the hospitals, the state figured it could rely on private facilities to treated the criminally insane, and group homes to treat other mentally disabled people. The result has been that our prisons now house mentally ill criminals, and many other former mental patients live not in group homes but on the street.
The United States has the world’s highest rate of incarceration. Just over 2.3 million Americans are now sitting in jail. And according to the National Institute of Mental Health, 56.2 percent of them in state prisons and 64.2 percent in local jails are mentally ill. Many of the remainder are in jail as a result of drug addiction. Nationally, we spend more than $60 billion a year to keep people behind bars, many of whom should instead be receiving treatment for mental problems and drug abuse.
The Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit advocacy organization, reports that in 2012, there were roughly 356,268 inmates with severe mental illnesses in prisons and jails, while only 35,000 people with the same diseases were in state psychiatric hospitals.
Hribal’s crime was ghastly. He was charged as an adult and could receive a long sentence. If the court rules he must be tried as a juvenile, he will be freed when he reaches 21. In either case, it now looks as if he’ll be serving his time in a prison cell, alone with his own demons.
When he is eventually released what sort of a person will he have become? Or what sort of a person could he be if he receives the treatment he needs?