By Bonnie Brown

Columnist

I’m certainly no doctor, but I listen to the news reports and articles addressing mental health and how it causes criminal behavior.   I’ve read that mental health problems can impair judgment, impulse control, and decision-making abilities which can influence an individual’s likelihood of committing a crime.

I suppose I think of mental health as something that results from some condition in the brain that overwhelms an individual and they suffer from schizophrenia, PTSD, bipolar disorder, etc. that affect the mental and physical self.

Behavioral health to me is a condition that is fashioned from an individual’s environment and how it affects their functioning.  I suppose I’m thinking of the many different groups of people who feel no remorse when they hack into someone’s financial account or social media account and take whatever value is there for their own.  There is no remorse, no guilt, and it is done by someone without a conscience.  How does this happen?

I had an occasion several years ago to receive an email threatening to take over my email account and use information for their benefit.  I contacted our IT person and said I was willing to help set this person up to get arrested for this criminal act.  He told me that my willingness to try bringing this criminal to justice was admirable, but this was likely someone who was in a 10-story building in a foreign country working from a cubicle making hundreds of these kinds of threats each day.

I felt foolish.  And angry.  And since then, we have seen criminal behavior of all kinds on a much broader scale.  Think about voter fraud, impersonation of a celebrity or known individual to use that approach for fraud, identity theft, and actions that furthered their unlawful pursuits.  Again, without conscience or remorse and seemingly without the ability to discern right from wrong.

The criminals are not all foreign.  Think about the person who is brazen enough to steal a vehicle from an individual at a service station in the middle of the day.  Or the person who shoplifts.  And often the reason they do it is the odds of apprehension are in their favor.

Is this mental health or is this behavioral health?  My thinking of behavioral health is that youngsters are influenced by the behavior of those around them.  Perhaps it’s their parents or peers who display criminal behavior which seems to be very rewarding to them.

In my opinion, many hard-core criminals began this pattern of behavior as class bullies.  They were able to take another student’s lunch money or some other possession and get away without any penalty. And from there, it became a habit and a practice that gave them confidence that they could get away with it and their bad behavior escalated to larger crimes.

Like I said, I’m not a doctor or psychologist or even that smart.  Except I do feel that my observations of criminal behavior disrupting our way of life is likely to be repeated in the next generation, and the next, until our culture, customs, beliefs, and traditions are forever altered.

I’m sad to see our way of life threatened by people who seem unable to discern right from wrong.  How did we get here?