Mentally Ill Need Compassion, Not Confrontation

A friend and his family were strolling down Melrose when your standard urban ruckus erupted down the block: a homeless man having it out with inner demons. Kicking newsstands, lunging at bicyclists. Shoving bystanders. Coming right at my friend and his family. Getting more whipped up with every step.

Now, children were present, as was the friend’s wife, a chain-smoking woman who might reach 5 feet tall if you put her in high heels and asked her to stand on tiptoe. The friend, a scholarly soul who has been in about as many fistfights as I have, felt his blood rise, like a reflex. “I’m going to have to hit this guy,” he thought, panicking, as the transient’s wild eyes swiveled and locked onto his.

And now came the madman, full steam and stomping. The friend’s hands were rising to defend his family--because that’s the instinct, isn’t it?--

when, quick as a wink, the wife darted between them, cigarette in her mouth, not a syllable of warning, and put her own hand up, and . . . touched . . . the madman’s . . . cheek.

“You’re having a bad day, aren’t you buddy?” she asked gently.

“Yeah,” the man replied, instantly calming. “I am.”

“I can tell. You want a cigarette?”

“Thanks.”

“Here. Take a couple. Voices talking to you today? Telling you to do things? They’re gonna get you into trouble, y’know.”

Within five minutes, the man--now quiet--had been persuaded to take a time out, go sit in a park, have a smoke, get it together, maybe go where a professional might help him. “That was amazing,” my friend told his wife afterward, as the shaken family resumed their stroll down Melrose.

“He didn’t need a fight. He needed someone to tell him it was going to be all right,” she replied. “That man had a riot going on in his head.”

*

Can you see yourself reacting that way, in a run-in with a deranged street person?

Me neither. It’s scary, mental illness. The urge to shove it away or run in the opposite direction is so knee-jerk, it’s as if some ancient instinct warns us that this thing called madness could wipe out the very species. What reflex is more compelling than the urge to avoid the truculent, unlovely, ungrateful nut case muttering at a lamppost? Who doesn’t recoil at the wild eyes, the filthy teeth, the unwashed feet?

It takes a brave person to muster compassion for the tortured and raving. Most people are not that brave. This is why so much of this particular urban crisis, here and elsewhere, has been fobbed off on the police, who, as it turns out, aren’t so reliably brave either. For details, see this week’s jarring report by Times staff writers Steve Berry and Josh Meyer, documenting the LAPD’s heartbreaking reaction: 37 shootings of the mentally ill over the past six years, including 25 deaths.

The report--culled from the LAPD’s own paperwork--dealt with officer-involved shootings of people who were suicidal, who’d forgotten their medication, who were not only unbalanced but also drug-addled, who didn’t always turn out to have been armed. Sometimes they were physically threatening, but more often--as in the matter of the diminutive bag lady Margaret Mitchell--the larger threat actually seemed more psychological.

One shooting occurred after the officer slipped while backing away from a man who was stabbing himself and shouting, “Kill me!” Another when a babbling stranger who’d thrown a grapefruit at a cop car began to yell wildly and reach for his fanny pack in the dark. Yet another stemmed from an “expressionless” stare from an otherwise compliant paranoid schizophrenic; unnerved, the officer put a hand on his holstered gun, prompting the paranoid man to lunge at him. The paperwork noted the officer’s rising “state of hysteria,” as he cried repeatedly that the mental patient was going for the weapon; only after the cop’s partner had opened fire did anyone realize that the gun had remained holstered throughout.

But you have to be brave to look into the abyss that is mental illness--brave enough to overcome the most fundamental sort of fear. This is why more police training and more nonlethal equipment options, though both are desperately needed, would provide only part of the answer. It’s not fair to anyone to pretend that a profession with an innate cultural abhorrence of weakness will, overnight, acquire a gift for handling the grotesquely weak.

There must be more competent treatment, more alternatives to dumping people in the street, more funding. And more understanding of these riots that erupt in people’s heads. We panic because, at some level, we know that health is relative, that the sick and the well are more alike than we prefer to acknowledge. There are few scarier realizations than “There but for the grace of God . . . “

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