It’s Open Season on the Walking Wounded

It’s hard to convey the frustration that has accumulated this week around Margaret Laverne Mitchell’s death. Maybe it has to do with the face she has suddenly put on homelessness, which, until now, had been yesterday’s forgotten crisis--the face of someone’s mother, slashing maniacally with a screwdriver at a policeman. Maybe it’s the timing, so soon after the Tyisha Miller shooting--another lawman’s panicked bullet in another troubled black woman’s chest.

Or maybe race is a red herring. Maybe it’s the fact that she was shot as the result of being derelict in a chichi shopping district, because merchants had wanted the cops to do something about bums stealing shopping carts and uglying up the place. Maybe it’s the dawning realization that there’s a difference between “broken windows” and broken people, that a city is only as great as its attitude toward its weak.

Or maybe it has to do with the fact that, again and again in recent months, tragedy has come in the same breath with the mental illness. That is the killer we can’t seem to wrap our minds around. It has been the demon of this long winter and springtime--say it: mental illness--from the Littleton schoolyard to the New York subways to the streets of Los Angeles.

Not that we have dared to call it entirely as we see it. At every turn, we’ve sought to dilute its importance, lacing every debate with sideline blather about the cost of care or the 2nd Amendment or the alleged trouble with kids these days. We can’t bring ourselves to simply say, for instance, that the Littleton shooters were two sick boys who were unnaturally fixated on guns and bombs and hierarchy and other things having to do with power. Nah. They were emblems. Yeah, that’s it. Emblems of . . . something more comprehensible. Hollywood. The Internet.

We won’t just say that the poor schizophrenic who pushed that poor young woman to her death from a New York subway platform in January was the tortured victim of an underfunded, underinsured, deeply stigmatized system, almost as messed up as the one in California. Oh, no. That tragedy was . . . something easier. A random breakdown. A New York thing.

And Margaret Laverne Mitchell, the college-educated grandmother who ended up dead on La Brea after her family had tried so fruitlessly to persuade her to get treatment--well, it’s unimaginable, isn’t it, that she might have resisted them because mental illness is seen as an awful, shameful thing? Oh, no. She was just exercising her civil right to fall apart at gunpoint on the street.

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A word about the fact that she was at gunpoint. I hate to talk about guns and mental illness in the same space because the linkage perpetuates the falsehood that “mentally ill” means “violent.” But there is a kind of link, beyond the fact that both guns and mental illness are vexing and long-standing problems. For one thing--and it must be said--guns are a symptom. People who can’t be without them are too concerned about power. If you’re healthy and normal, you don’t require guns and bombs in your daily life just to feel OK. There is something wrong with people--cops included--who in every encounter feel one-down without a lethal weapon in hand.

There is something wrong with a law enforcement culture that opts for lethal force as frequently and in as many situations as the police and deputies do in Los Angeles. There is something wrong with the fact that California law enforcement officers have so little real training (4 1/2 hours on average, according to one mental health advocate) in how to deal with the mentally ill.

There’s something wrong, for that matter, with the way we all look at the psychologically troubled. The conventional wisdom is that when mentally ill people refuse treatment and shelter, it’s solely their warped biochemistry talking, but the broader truth is that there are a million other reasons for them not to admit they’re crazy. No one likes to be looked down on, and even they can see how we disdain people like them.

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Why we can’t rise above that disdain is a kind of mystery. The repulsion is so instinctive that people who understand these things suggest it may be Darwinian. The species recoils from traits that could harm it; it may be partly because of some ancient reflex that the unhealthy are shunned.

But compassion is also part of what it means to belong to this species. So what does it mean that at every level of governance, we have done everything possible to tamp compassion down? The streets and jails and prisons overflow with our accumulated frustrations--with fellow humans who might seek and find decent treatment if mental illness, in all its permutations, were something we could all wrap our minds around.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is: shawn.hubler@latimes.com