Suspect in Killing of Berkeley, Ca. Senior had Mental Problem History and Psychiatry Failed Once Again

The mother of a man accused of beating a 67 year-old Berkeley homeowner to death last month was quoted in the media as saying her son suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. She said her son has been neglected by a broken mental heath care system that fails to properly treat those with serious needs. The suspect Daniel Jordan Dewitt has been to numerous hospitals since he was a teenager according to reports. Dewitt is the grandson of the late former Alameda city councilman and interim Alameda Mayor Al Dewitt, who died in 2003. He has been arraigned on murder charges. He physically beat and dragged the 67 year old homeowner with a planter pot.

The suspect’s mother has contacted Judges, mental health facilities; victim rights advocates, prosecutor’s to no avail. He has been on and off his meds recently.
"We have been trying for more than four and a half years to get our son help," Candy Dewitt said.

The key to this story to us is the medication which Daniel Jordan Dewitt was taking and not taking and the psychiatrist. A psychiatrist has been treating him for years and has accomplished nothing but this devastating end result to a senior citizen who most likely looked forward to retirement. There has been questions to how quickly the police responded, but you will not hear from the media that medications played a role in the murder or that a psychiatrist and a failing mental health system has no positive results for decades. If there was a gun involved then the media and government would blame the gun. What you may hear in the future is that the mental health facilities will need more funds, or more people need to be medicated longer. You never hear that psychiatry is a failure from its inception. Shock treatments, strait jackets, lobotomies, enforced confinement, kids killing kids while on medications, medications that cause suicides.

The system in the US and Western world has been to fund failure and death and no results and blame lack of money, or not enough medications. Funding and reinforcing failure is the norm. Why would you continue to fund a failed mental health system? Why call or listen to a psychiatrist? Why put your kids or young adult on psychotropic drugs when the main side effects are aggressive behavior or suicide.

You the citizen can stop this nonsense! You the consumer can disagree with this madness. This persists because the tax payer allows this history of loss to continue.