I don’t think, for all my occasional respect for David Brooks of The New York Times, I would nominate him to define the changes needed in our mental health policy. (See his column of January 10, “The Politicized Mind,” primarily addressed to our press punditry’s failure to account for the likely schizophrenia of Jared Loughner, the accused Arizona assassin.)
But when Brooks makes reference, at the end, to a need to understand “a deeper realm of disorder, cruelty and horror,” it’s a shame he doesn’t point his readers beyond the potential violence of some schizophrenics.
Loughner’s isolation and prevailing thought patterns were extreme; he does probably, from the evidence Brooks offers, suffer from an unusually violent form of schizophrenia. But we would be seriously remiss to relegate that deeper realm of disorder, cruelty and horror to a relatively unusual form of mental illness.
It lives as an undercurrent, however unattended or sublimated, in most of our lives, and we are often drawn to its depiction in the media with a fascination born of identification.
Confronting and dealing with—I will say befriending, because we are in the realm of powerful transformation—such shadow presence in our own psyches is an essential dimension of redeeming and realizing our capacity for humane order, for love, affection and empathic response to others, for the grace and gift of the light of the world.