Bangladesh Canada and Beyond: The Attack on the Pope, Other Celebrities and Mental Illness -- 3

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

The Attack on the Pope, Other Celebrities and Mental Illness -- 3

Mahatma Gandhi (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: 1869-1948)
Graphics courtesy: www.iloveindia.com

All Attacks Are Not By the Mentally Ill

The mentally deranged were not behind all the attacks and assassinations of important personalities. The following attacks or killings were politically motivated, pre-planned coolly and carried out in a calculated manner:

1865 (April 14): An assassin shoots and kills US President Abraham Lincoln in a theatre in Washington, D.C.
1948 (January 30): Another assassin kills Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi), leader of Indian independence movement, in New Delhi.
1951 (October 16): Pakistan's first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan dies by bullets while speaking to local Muslim League party members in a park in Rawalpindi.
1963 (November 22): John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the USA, is cut down by bullets while in an open-air motorcade in Dallas, Texas.
1968 (April 4): US black civil rights (human rights) leader Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
1968 (June 5): US Senator Robert F. Kennedy, while on his presidential election campaign, is shot and killed in a hotel in Los Angeles.
1975 (August 15): Newly-independent Bangladesh's first Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is assassinated by some young army officers in Dhaka.
1981 (May 13): Mehmet Ali Agca, a young radical Turk shoots and seriously injures Pope John Paul II when he was proceeding on an open vehicle towards the podium in St. Peter's Square in the Vatican to speak to an audience.
1981 (October 6): Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat is shot and killed by some armymen in a military parade in Cairo.
1984 (Ocober 31): India's first female Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, daughter of India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, is killed by her own Sikh bodyguards, while walking in her garden in New Delhi.
1991 (May 21): Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the eldest son of late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, is killed in a suicide bomber's blast at Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, India.
1995 (November 4): Israel's 5th Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is shot and killed in Tel Aviv by Yigal Amir, one of the radical right-wing Orthodox Jews, who vehemently opposed Israel's reconciliation efforts with the Arabs and Palestinians.

It Is Easy to Blame Mentally Ill People

It is much easier to blame, accuse, arrest and incarcerate the mentally ill persons when attacks or killings occur. In reality, do the mentally-ill persons exactly know what they were doing at the time of doing the violence? Although modern science has come a long way on understanding mental illnesses, common people are still way behind in being adequately aware of and knowledgeable about these illnesses and dealing with the relative issues.

Those Dealing with the Public, Need Orientation on Mental Illnesses

In fact, those who deal with the public -- the police, judges, politicians, doctors, nurses, teachers, customer service personnel, and so on -- need proper understanding of mental illnesses and ways to deal with people with such illnesses.

What Is Mental Illness? What Causes Mental Illness? How Many Types of Mental Illnesses Are There? What to do with Mental Illness?

To know about and understand mental illness in its different aspects, you may visit the following blogs and websites: