Particularly with schizophrenia you see a lot of concern that these people could escape and kill people, or they could threaten our political order.
The issue of guns, as president [Barack] Obama mentioned, which is particularly assailant in Colorado, a very complicated gun story, and I think a political climate that urges people to take issues into their own hands.
I think that we're making a mistake if we don't see that there is a cultural basis to many illnesses, not just psychiatric ones. Breast cancer would be one prevalent example right now, different kind of cultures surrounding it. If you don't understand the cultural meaning of an illness like that you're going to miss the boat even if you're a great scientist.
Depression as one example is an illness that has a chemical basis, but also is deeply embedded in cultural norms about gender, social class, race.
I think part of why schizophrenia got linked to civil rights protest in the '60s was because mainstream society was coding threats against the smooth running of the state as insanity and treating it as such, and so as that happens you see the evolution of a process in which people with schizophrenia are increasingly feared and our hospitals, particularly the kind of hospital that I look at in the book become to look more and more like prisons, to the point where many of them including the one I talk about actually become prisons.
Mental illness is a real thing. It has real material consequences for people who suffer from it and at the time even the most biological finding reflects social context in very important ways, and so I think psychiatry is better off looking both at biology and at social context and really trying to think of the relationship between these and I think doctors and patients are better off that way.
I'm a practicing psychiatrist and I think that I really believe in the advances of psychiatry. Our diagnoses are more precise.
I think that one of the other lessons about what happened here is that open carry laws, even though many police, sheriff departments in Colorado support them, make it much harder for law enforcement to do their jobs.
I think President [Barack] Obama is exactly right, we need to combat [gun shoots] because this really can become the new normal, but that`s really what`s been happening.
There are really exciting things happening in genetic and neurobiology right now, and really looking at the ways in which different not just illnesses, but social conditions and social pressures can actually lead to actual brain changes.
