Marcus Schrenker, the Indiana "businessman" who took more than $1 million from clients of his financial service, then tried to fake his own death in a plane crash, says he plans to write a book about his ordeal, which will explain that, really, it wasn't his fault at all:
Schrenker seemed to lay some of the blame for what happened on his bi-polar disorder, which he claims was diagnosed while he was in college.
But a psychology professor who talked with the Times about Schrenker's claims seemed doubtful that a manic bi-polar state could last long enough for someone to plan a flight, and stash a motorcycle where he could find it after parachuting from the plane, as Schrenker was convicted of doing.
Actually, the manic state can last that long, but let's leave that for another post.
If this book does get written, we can only hope it goes almost directly to die in the bargain bins. There are millions of Americans with Bipolar Disorder (no hyphen, please, journalists) who are not criminals. We could use another good book or two to describe what they have to go through just to get through life. This isn't likely to be such a book. It will just perpetuate the myth that most people with severe mental illness are criminals or prone to violence. That myth already shapes public opinion and, too often, drives the criminal justice approach to mental illness.
