Everything that’s wrong with our approach to mental illness, in one news story
Reporters, editors, and police officers need to take a step back and think about the logic of what they’re doing. For too long, the shorthand approach to encounters with people who may be suffering from some sort of mental illness is, essentially, to laugh about it and write it up.
Take the story from the Orlando Sentinel, which is hardly a tabloid (the paper wrote thoughtfully about my decision to reveal my mental illness, and recently published an op-ed of mine on barriers to mental health care).
But this story pissed me off, right from the headline: Cops: Astor man said he is creator, owns world. (It’s the rare case of a headline without the word “Kardashian” that proves the story to follow isn’t actually news)
Seeing that in my social media feed, I tensed, and clicked — expecting a few things: first, that this was going to be yet another case of news media playing mental illness for laughs (and clicks), and second, that this was going be yet another case of a person in need of help getting sent instead to jail, branded a criminal.
The “story” here is simple: a man was discovered “hiding” in some bushes outside a convenience store, watching an employee pick up garbage. No violence, no threat, just a man in his 60’s who clearly needed some help.
When a sheriff’s deputy arrived (from the Lake County Sheriff’s Office, a good department that I occasionally worked with in my time as a television reporter in Florida), the man made incoherent comments (“I am the creator”) and refused to come out of the bushes. He was subsequently arrested, the Sentinel reports, “due to his behavior and refusal to identify himself,” and was charged with “loitering and prowling.”
“Prowling,” by the way, is a legally questionable charge that suggests the man was lurking in an area with an intent to commit a crime. And there you go. Now he’s no longer a man rambling incoherently, hiding in bushes and appearing disheveled — he’s a criminal plotting his next crime! Thankfully, law enforcement got there in time!
Now, people who find themselves suddenly incoherent in the parking lots of convenience stores due to, say, hypoglycemia will rarely be charged with “prowling” — especially if they’re found on the ground next to a car, not looking homeless. Those kinds of “lurkers” are usually whisked away to an emergency room.
But it’s more than just the fact that this man was treated as a criminal in the absence of a crime. He was also made into a news story in the absence of news. The man’s words — “I am the creator” — were more than enough to take a non-story and make it into a fun little bit of clickbait for a newspaper that otherwise does good journalism.
Read this graf and decide for yourself — reporting, or mockery?
Ramsey was asked what he was doing, and said “I am the creator and it’s none of your business,” the report states.
When asked who he was, Ramsey replied “I am the Alpha and the Omega, look it up,” the report states.
Ramsey tried to hide in the bushes again, and kept responding to the deputy’s request for his name with “look it up,” deputies said.
After being taken into custody, Ramsey continued to mumble that he was the creator and that he owned the world, the report states.
The man “continued to mumble…that he owned the world,” the reporter writes, yet manages to make not one mention of the possibility this was a man with a mental illness. (I confess in my reporting I surely did the same thing — turning sick people into criminals for the sake of a story. I did it not out of malice, but ignorance, and the regret over doing so led me to go public with my own mental health diagnosis)
Most stories like this end with a throwaway line about the person in custody getting a psychiatric evaluation. Not this story. From headline to the last sentence, readers were asked to believe this was a news story about a sheriff’s deputy finding a pre-criminal hiding in the bushes — a man so bold as to claim under questioning that he was “the creator.”
The most obvious explanation was never considered, perhaps because to do so would mean this was not a crime, and it wouldn’t have landed online and in the newspaper.
But that’s what happens when your illness involves your brain, and not your blood sugar.
We can do so much better.
