One Second After [100]
"There is another issue as well, though, that I don't think many of us thought of, but Tom, you better start gearing up for it and we might have to start thinking about taking over a building as another isolation ward."
"What for?" Kate asked.
"Severe psychosis."
"You mean insanity?" Tom asked. "Hell, we're already seeing enough crazies coming in at the gap. And the suicides as well over the last month. I think we're all half-crazy now."
"Well, it's going to get a lot worse within a matter of days," Kellor said.
"Why within days?" Tom interjected.
"About a quarter of the population was on antidepressants or antianxiety agents. Prozac, Xanax, Lexapro, even just plain old lithium. Most of those people rushed to the pharmacies and stocked up, but even then, on average a person got at best a thirty-day supply.
"They're running out now. Withdrawal for some won't be too bad; for others symptoms will be quite severe, including hallucinations. Compound that with the stress we are under already. As an old-time doc I'll be the first to tell you quite a few on these meds were just mildly neurotic, living in a very pampered society where it was almost obligatory to have some sort of disorder. But seriously, roughly five percent of the population do have severe disorders, and one to two percent dangerous disorders that include severe paranoia and potential for highly aggressive behavior."
"In other words, expect a lot of insanity," Tom said.
"You'll be the one dealing with it," Kellor replied, "and I think your people better be briefed on it. Not too long ago in our past families suffered with it, keeping their crazy uncle Louie restrained or locked away, or shipped them to state hospitals which were indeed snake pits. Where do you think the word 'bedlam' came from? It was the hospital for the insane
in eighteenth-century England and, if you saw the old prints, a true hellhole.
"We haven't dealt with this ever since all the modern meds started coming out in the sixties and seventies. That and the changing of laws that pretty well stopped involuntary commitment except in extreme cases emptied the hospitals.
"If it was back fifty years ago, at least a hundred of our fellow citizens would be already under some form of restraint, either at home or in a state institution. Now they are with us and the medications that kept them somewhat stable are gone. Hundreds more are in varying degrees of instability as well. What I'm trying to get across is that we'll have upwards of a thousand people in our community who are in varying degrees of psychological unbalance, not related at all to the crisis but instead to their forced withdraw from medications. And at least fifty to a hundred will be extremely dangerous, to themselves or to others. Severe paranoids, schizophrenics, delusional personalities, several living here with criminal pasts but who were declared insane, treated, then released back into the community. I think, Charlie, you are going to have to authorize me to be able to declare people to be mentally unstable and to then incarcerate them by force. We'll need then to find people to tend to them, and also decide how we deal with food distribution to them."
Charlie sighed, rubbing his beard, and then nodded.
"I authorize you to have the authority to declare a person to be mentally deranged and to have them incarcerated, if need be against their will or that of their family. Tom, you will be responsible for arrest. I'll post that notice later today."
Kellor nodded.
"I think in at least thirty or forty cases we should move preemptively, meaning now, even if they still have some meds left. As a doctor, I know which of my patients were truly over the edge long before this happened. Patients who had repeated hospitalizations and incidents. Tom, you would know some of them, too, from incidents that led to their going to a psychiatric unit or jail. I think we should grab those people now before it gets bad."
"One thing," John said quietly.
"Go on."
"Keep in the back of our minds how that