John Hinckley Jr - Case Study Example

The case caught the public eye partly because the facts of the case showed a lonely, friendless, withdrawn man from an affluent family who was living alone in a constricted shell where he enlivened it by his own fantasies and delusions and when everything else exploded in his mind, he resorted to stalking his perceived inamorata Jodie Foster and finally hatching a plan to assassinate President Reagan so that he will forever be narcissistically linked to her in a unique bond. The 20th and 21st centuries had seen an alarming increase in cases of insanity in America.

Such increase was so disturbing that it was termed 'the insanity epidemic" or the 'invisible plague" and many rationalized that it was the end result of so many factors including "immigrants, alcohol, inbreeding, degenerating morals and others" (Torrey & Miller 2001, p. 315). Today's increase of insanity has reached the panic level. Because of the utter number of the insane, America has largely not been able to deal with the problem head-on. The root of the treatment problem is that America has find it "difficult to hospitalize many patients in need of treatment and the competition for the limited number of beds all but ensures that they will be discharged prematurely".

and the dismal consequence of all of these failures is that many of those afflicted with insanity especially schizophrenia end up using the penitentiary system as their locus of public mental health services ( Appelbaum 2008,p 1493). Respected psychiatrist Torrey had also come up with a finding that "severely mentally ill individuals are responsible for Hinckley 3 at least 5% of all homicides in the United States and that the seriously mentally ill account for 3-5% of all violence committed in USA (Appelbaum 2008,p. 146). So many crimes of violence and homicide had been reported wherein the insane committed such crimes under the delusion that he is "redressing or revenging some supposed grievance or injury or of producing some supposed public benefit" (Morris 1982, p. 395). United States v John Hinckley Jr.

The case of John Hinckley Jr., however, was unique because the attempt to assassinate the most powerful man in the universe at that time, US President Ronald Reagan was not done out of some imagined grievance or injury to the would-be assassin or to effect a public benefit but to call