What Do We Owe the Insufferable? - by Awais Aftab

When mental illness exhausts our emotional capacities

In “The People v. Insanity,” (The Dispatch, August 6, 2025) Emmett Rensin examines some uncomfortable questions surrounding mental illness, criminal responsibility, and society’s conflicting responses to the mentally ill, especially those who behave disruptively to a degree that they end up in legal trouble. Rensin’s primary focus is on the insanity plea, however, I am more interested in the non-legal aspects of Rensin’s analysis and the application to our social and clinical lives. Rensin makes a case that our collective discomfort with the insanity defense reflects “an ancient dilemma”…

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