Paul Harrington: Guilty Or Not? Possible Interventions

Paul Harrington: guilty or not?
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Paul Harrington: guilty or not?
It is not every day that you get to hear a man who kills his wife and children, twice. This case is one of the most followed proceedings on television. Behavioral psychologists, researchers, and lawyers have brought arguments based on this ruling. Psychologists focus on mental breakdown while lawyers argue from the justice point of view where the court is the ultimate defender of human rights (Kinscherff, 2010). Both in their way are correct. But what if things would have turned around? Would the situations have been any different? In a way, both the doctors and the criminal system failed Paul, and this led him to be a repeat offender.
Mental health is a little-known area yet it affects almost all of us. Mental health is not taken with as much seriousness as other sectors of the economy. People do not find it fit spending money on “things that are not seen” yet a sick mind is the most dangerous disease a man could have. Take for example if the court would have kept Paul under psychiatric watch when he committed the first murder. Having been in the army, he had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that was not correctly handled (Chappell, 2010). In as much as he was put on medication, counseling was an essential part of the healing process. Trauma from his days in the field would be piled up and eventually explode somewhere. Without the proper care needed by the military, it was not long till he shot his wife and children. The system would have put him in a trauma recovery center to ensure that he was progressing well. The two months spent in the state hospital were not adequate to give him all the attention that ...