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Academic papers on youth violence in America—causes and possible solutions—are legion.
But when a socially committed, psychoanalytically trained senior psychiatrist and an academic psychologist with extensive work “on the ground” at the interface of mental illness and crime team up in the pages of a major publication read by the business community to tackle rampant violence in America’s third largest city—it’s just possible people will sit up and take notice. Past APA trustee and Chicago-area native Sidney Weissman, M.D., and Arthur Lurigio, Ph.D., associate dean for faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola University, cowrote a three-part article on violence in Chicago that appeared in successive issues of Crain’s Chicago Business in May. The articles address how rates of violence have spiraled in the city, while New York and Los Angeles have made some progress, reforming police interactions with minority communities and creating safe neighborhoods. Weissman and Lurigio urge extensive reforms grounded in expertise on the effects of culture on the brain and development.
Weissman is a professor of clinical psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and on the faculty and board of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Lurigio is the senior research advisor to Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities at Loyola and has experience as principal investigator on more than 40 grants with city, county, state, and federal resources.
In an interview with Psychiatric News, Weissman said that he and Lurigio sought out a respected publication in the business community, because the city’s business leaders have a stake in a safe city while Chicago’s civic leaders have been mired in political stagnation.
“Nothing has been meaningfully done, and the basic underlying issues aren’t changing,” Weissman said. “There has been a fundamental failure on the part of the city administration and the business community to act.”
Weissman added that he believes psychiatry needs to regain its voice for addressing social issues, aided now by vastly more advanced knowledge about the brain and the effects of the surrounding culture on brain development over time.
The first article, appearing in print on May 18, looked at the scope of violence in Chicago and how other cities have succeeded where Chicago has failed. “Nearly 20 years ago, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) added 1,000 new officers and shifted its focus from an arrest-heavy to a service-heavy style of enforcement,” they wrote. “Police officers were rewarded for community outreach activities. No such sustained efforts have ever been implemented in Chicago, and the gulf between the police and community grows ever wider.”
They added, “The LAPD used the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute to charge and convict gang leaders and other members with the crimes of their compatriots, even if they only conspired with the actual perpetrators. Large numbers of gang members were incarcerated with that strategy. Under former Superintendent Jody Weis (2008-2011), the Chicago Police Department (CPD) only threatened to invoke, but never systematically employed, the RICO statute against Chicago gangs. What’s more, today barely a quarter of homicide perpetrators—many of them gang members—is even arrested in Chicago.”
Weissman and Lurigio noted that the LAPD also used civil injunctions or abatement laws to rid the streets of congregations of gang members. “Empty corners provide no one to shoot or no opportunity to be the victim of a shooting. From 1992 to 1999, Chicago tried a similar strategy based on curfew violations and loitering but it was deemed unconstitutional.”
(The use of RICO against alleged gang members is regarded as highly controversial among some in the African-American community.)
The second and third articles, appearing online May 22 and 23, looked more closely at how pervasive societal failures have shaped the lives and coping skills of children and adolescents in Chicago’s African-American communities and at the effects of “the elephant in the room”—race and racial segregation. They especially focused on the effects of trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“By the time a young man picks up a gun and pulls the trigger, he has been prepared to do so by deficient parenting, school failure, and repeated trauma—the latter the result of witnessing violence in the home and in the street,” Weissman and Lurigio wrote. “The impact of such trauma throughout a youth’s life can be severe and result in PTSD. Most of the young people with PTSD either have been the direct target of violence or have directly witnessed life-threatening violence. …
“For those who suffer from childhood PTSD, the ability to recognize their own or others’ feelings is impaired. Their apparent toughness obscures this disability and becomes a means to feel safe in their dangerous world. Toughness becomes an essential element of survival, a means to attain respect, for which they are validated from fellow, equally impaired gang members. … The most violent among them earn the highest approval and greatest elevation in status by killing a rival gang member.”
Lurigio and Weissman said that sustained behavioral health care interventions in the city’s neighborhoods are urgently needed. “In particular, strategies to prevent delinquency, which is a precursor to violence, have been created, studied, and established as evidence-based. … For example, among several effective interventions for at-risk youth are the Big Brothers Big Sisters community-based mentoring program and the Aggression Replacement Training and First Step to Success programs. Those that are effective for at-risk families include the Functional Family Therapy and the Guiding Good Choices programs. The crime- and violence-reducing benefits of these programs greatly outweigh the costs.”
Weissman and Lurigio acknowledged that their recommendations are “both sweeping in nature and limited in logistical details” and that “abundant resources and greater specificity will be needed to bring these recommendations to fruition.” They are not sanguine about the ease or quickness with which anything can be accomplished—far from it, their articles make for sad reading about the state of one of America’s great cities.
But they do offer a way up and out. “This is a part of what psychiatry is about,” Weissman said. “We have a unique understanding of the psychology of young people and the effects of the surrounding culture on their development. We owe it to those young people to help shape a culture in which they can grow to make healthy choices. It’s not happening in Chicago.” ■
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