Investigating Criminal Minds

      On our last week of break, I found myself just laying around my house, simply enjoying my last week of vacation before mid-terms and the end of the semester. On Thursday, the television show Criminal Minds was having a marathon event, and I must have watched about four hours of this show. I don't know if any of my fellow classmates have ever seen the show, but it's about detectives who try to solve crimes, similar to Law & Order and NCIS. However, being an avid watcher of these kind of crime shows, I have found that Criminal Minds features extremely gruesome crimes, always so bizarre compared to the others. Most of these crimes are committed by lunatics or psychopaths, but something about them had me intrigued. While watching this show, I couldn't help but think of the recent novel we read, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and how it related to the show. One episode in particular that sticks out in my mind was when a man had convinced thirty people to commit a mass suicide in the name of God. This reminded me how the inmates would almost blindly follow McMurphy's actions in the hospital, and how they would anything he told them to. Although McMurphy's actions can be considered beneficial compared to the criminal in the show, they both had this charismatic personality, where just by talking to people they could manipulate people to their wills. Criminal Minds however reveals the darker side of insanity, and how not everyone who is insane is like Chief Bromden or Billy Bibbit: practically harmless. There are definitely insane people who have the capability to commit massive destruction, and I felt like the novel only showed the less harmless side of insanity. In the real world, there are different types of insanity, not simply acutes and chronics, but harmful and harmless.