Morally Wrong, or Sick?

Quote of the day:
“Over the years, some convergence of gangsta rappers and shock jocks and bloggers have given more and more people license to use words that were once washed out with soap, or blocked with bleeps. Sex sells, hate sells and the combination is boffo biz.”
--Ellen Goodman in Friday’s Boston Globe.

Quote of the day no. 2:
“What is cheating? We need to forget about the past and let us play the game. We’re entertainers. Let us entertain.”
--Barry Bonds

Where is the line drawn between consciously bad (or criminal) behavior and mental illness? This question gets ready answers from extremists on each side. Some think all criminals should be locked up, period. On the other side, some think that bad behavior is always caused by mental illness.

As always, the truth exists somewhere in the large middle, and it can be hard to discern. Here is one observation, from Chip Ward, former assistant director of the Salt Lake City library (from Tomdispatch.com):

“Take the case of a young man who entered the library spouting racial and ethnic slurs. He loudly asked some Latino teenagers doing their homework when they had crossed the border, and they reported his rude behavior.

“When a security guard approached, the young man started yelling obscenities and then took a swing at him. The guard tried to calm him, but on the next lunge, the guard took him down, cuffed his hands behind his back and called the police. They recognized the man. He had been let out of jail just two days earlier.

“That man’s behavior, of course, was not a measure of his character but of his psychosis. He was sick, not bad.

“If we accept that schizophrenia, for instance, is not the result of a character flaw or personal failing but of some chemical imbalance in the brain--an imbalance that can strike a person regardless of his or her values, beliefs, upbringing, social standing or intent, just like any other disease might strike one--then why do we apply to mental illness a kind of moral judgment we wouldn’t use in other medical situations?

“We do not, for example, jail a diabetic who is acting drunk because his body chemistry has become so unbalanced that he is going into insulin shock.”