MSNBC: Mental health and guns

[Jadecristal]

The guy kinda seems to get it - it's not the guns - but still complains about them. Comments, or would anyone like to email him?

Broken mental-health system puts us at risk
Va. Tech and spate of other killings reveal danger of ignoring mental illness
COMMENTARY
By Arthur Caplan, Ph.D.
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 1:51 p.m. CT April 23, 2007

It is not just guns. In all my life I never thought I would write those words after a massacre involving a mass murder with a gun. But a week’s worth of intense media coverage of the heinous murders of students and faculty at Virginia Tech and analyses focusing on guns by innumerable experts has left me furious.

I don’t think the expert wisdom is even close to understanding what must be done to try and prevent this type of tragedy in the future. It is not just guns. We need to fix a broken, abandoned and pathetic system of mental-health care.

In the same month that Seung-Hui Cho killed and injured scores of people at Virginia Tech, a researcher at the University of Washington was shot to death in her office by a former boyfriend, who then killed himself. Rebecca Griego had gotten a restraining order against Jonathan Rowan. When he showed up at her office he fired five shots into Rebecca. A colleague at the university said it was a “psycho from her past.”

In Mandeville, La., a man who had just had a restraining order issued against him by his estranged wife allegedly ambushed her and their three children. Police say James Magee chased his wife’s gray Toyota Scion for several blocks, ramming it repeatedly until the car crashed into a tree. As Adrienne Magee tried to get out of the vehicle, James Magee allegedly stepped out of the truck and shot her in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with buckshot, killing her instantly. He then opened fire on his children as they tried to flee the vehicle, killing his 5-year-old son and striking his 7-year-old daughter in the chest, according to police.

Magee had never gotten any help for previous violent outbursts.

And in Queens, New York, a man killed his mother, a wheelchair-bound man and a home health care worker before shooting himself dead — just minutes after the mother called 911 pleading for help.

The mother's surviving sister blamed police for failing to protect her sister from the "mentally ill" son. "My sister was scared!" Annetta Taylor screamed. "She thought this might happen!"

Cops outside the house tried to calm her, but she continued. "I blame you!" she said. "She called and nobody would respond!"

The murdered mother, Sonia Taylor, had called police twice Monday during fights with her son Wade Dawkins.

The police had been called to the home eight times since last May. During an incident this past October, Taylor told police her son, a drug abuser with no rap sheet, was throwing things around the house and acting violently.

The police brought him to a local hospital for an evaluation. He was quickly sent back to her house.

All of these killings involved not just guns, all involved killers who might have benefited from mental-health treatment. None got the help they needed.

The Virginia Tech murderer was — to be blunt — totally crazy. He fit the dreary profile all too familiar from the shootings at Columbine High School near Denver and the Nickel Mines School in Amish country near Lancaster, Penn. Cho was an angry outcast, preoccupied with thoughts of violence against those whom he saw as bullying, victimizing or just plain ignoring him. From the tapes he made of himself, it is obvious that he was in the grip of paranoia. He had profound social withdrawal, suicidal thinking, destructive fantasies and was a known stalker. He scared people. But he fell through the cracks of university bureaucracy and a hodgepodge mental-health system.

Report after report over the past decade have warned that most public mental-health systems have, to quote one, “all but disintegrated.” Such systems, whether local, state or federal, are badly fragmented and ill-equipped to address our nation’s mental health in a comprehensive manner.

States have been balancing their budgets on the backs of the mentally ill for years. A recent example is North Carolina, where 33 percent cuts in the state budget have been proposed. Advocates for the mentally ill there say that if the cuts hold, it means that in many towns the mental-health system will simply “collapse.”

But you don’t really need to read the reports or look at the budgets. Look out your window. Most of the homeless people wandering around America’s cities are mentally ill. Try to get help for your anorexic daughter, alcoholic brother-in-law, suicidal spouse and see what happens.

See what happens if someone threatens or harasses you repeatedly in terms of a coordinated police and mental-health response.

Serving in Iraq or Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder or another mental illness? Good luck. The military’s mental-health system is overwhelmed and understaffed. The services available to our soldiers’ families are just as bad.

I don’t buy the line that says "guns don’t kill people, people kill people." I think there are too many guns with too much firepower that are too readily available. When the damaged and the deranged amongst us go undiagnosed and untreated in a world of guns, then fatalities result. The guns are not going anywhere. Politically, we lack the will to do anything about that problem.

But that is not the whole problem. It is time to start repairing a mental-health system that serves too few, costs too much, protects too little and cannot even find the means to help those who clearly are in desperate need. Maybe after Virginia Tech we can at least find the will to do that much.

Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., is director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
© 2007 MSNBC Interactive© 2007 MSNBC Interactive

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18262056/

 

[ArmedBear]

Try to get help for your anorexic daughter, alcoholic brother-in-law, suicidal spouse and see what happens.

Well, 'round these parts, there are practicioners and establishments falling all over themselves to provide that help, paid for by health insurance. There are inpatient programs, hospital programs, outpatient programs, support groups, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and non-profit volunteer groups of all stripes; there are mutual aid groups like AA and its many offspring.

There's a good reason to round up the really off-the-deep-end people wandering the streets, and see what we can do to help them, or at least keep them from hurting others. Not everyone can be helped. That might even be -- I hate to admit it -- worth spending tax money on, since it IS a community problem when violent crazy people wander the streets, just like when there are no streetlights and the streets are full of potholes.

However, to suggest that you can't get help for run-of-the-mill psychological problems and life challenges is just a load of crap.

People like the VT killer are a societal problem and a threat, it's true. But what this guy appears to really want, beneath it all, is a country where he and his colleagues across the hall in shrink school get an endless flow of tax dollars so they can "help" everyday people with everyday life problems.

 

[Apple a Day]

Armedbear,
I would add this to your statement:
There are lots of people and places to go to get help AS LONG AS YOU CONSENT TO GET HELP. As long as the mentally ill person says that they don't want help then there's nothing the "authorities" can do until the person commits a crime and the victim is willing to prosecute.

The author of the article IMHO is decrying the fact that there is no big brother system of healthcare/government which is capable of violating the personal rights of people 'for their own good'.

Does an alcoholic/drug addict or suicidal person need help? Yep.
Can they still refuse help? Yep.

Do addicts deny they need help? Usually. How about depressed people? Again, until they hit rock bottom, they sure do. Can you force them? Nope. If they want to destroy their lives then it's their choice and I support their right to make that choice.

How about paranoid schizophrenics? They'll deny they have a problem and decline treatment. They'll deny, deny, deny until they become violent. Then they hurt someone and it's too late to prevent it. I have penty of experience with this because my father has Alzheimers and turned into a raging, paranoid, homicidal maniac. Finally getting him institutionalized took an ungodly long, convoluted, complicated beaurocratic maze of paperwork and only happened after he beat the Hell out of my mother a few times and I practically had to choke the slimy little turd of a social worker who should have been in charge of helping. I'm not using metaphors here, I mean all that literally. Here, in my humble opinion, things get fuzzy as the the rights of the individual versus the public. If the systems we have in place were at all competent then it might be an easier decision. Unfortunately, that isn't the case.

You can yell, threaten, and break every piece of property you own and there's nothing anybody can do about it. The mental health system isn't "broken" it's just that nobody is willing to step across the line and forcibly commit someone who hasn't yet done anything violent against someone else. It's against the very Constitution to imprison people without reason and without fair trial. People like Cho walk right up to the line with their behaviors and hover just short of corssing it. Crazy doesn't mean stupid. When they do make the decision to cross the line they make the decision to do it in a big way. Unless we're willing to accept the idea that the government has the right to drag people away kicking and screaming when they haven't yet committed a crime based on being denounced by neighbors and family (sound like communist Russia to anyone?) then there's no way to stop them. In most cases it's better that we don't allow the government to forcibly commit people against their will. There is tremendous room for abuse in such a power.

In an ideal world it would make sense to be able to put questionable people in front of a judge, present the evidence, and get a ruling as to the competency of the person. That's what nearly happened to Cho. The judge, however, sentenced him to outpatient therapy. Cho went on to kill anyway so obviously that avenue isn't perfect either. People will fall through the cracks. The people on whose judgement rests our future and safety will make mistakes.

SO, if we can't rely on the judgement of the courts, if the hands of the police are tied by the Constitution, if the rights of the individual still trump the wants of the masses then what do we do?

A)infringe on everyone's rights in the vain hope that a system which can't effectively deal with a dangerous person will somehow perform more effectively if everyone is convicted and punished before they can commit a crime. Take your Soma like good little sheep and don't even think about the g-u-n word.

B)allow those who are nearest the threat the freedom to exercise their own judgement, the right to do what neither the police nor the healthcare system can: protect ourselves.


Sorry this turned into such a rant. I'm not sure it's coherent. It just sort of came spilling out. As a VT grad, a teacher, and having had to go through the process of committing my father it's weighed on my mind.
God bless and keep us all,
Apple

 

[SteveS]

Having worked in the public and private mental health system, I can say that it is not half as bad as the article states (at least in my state). It is true that public mental health services have taken some serious cuts, especially when compared to other parts of the healt care system. That being said, they have not "all but disintegrated."

As the previous poster indicates, the biggest barrier to getting treatment is the person that needs treatment. They have to want treatment and seek it out. Depending on you insurance, you can have a wide variety of practicioners to choose from. If you have no insurance, most states have free or low cost services that are good.

Unless we are willing to start rounding people up and forcing them into treatment, we will have to accept the fact that there will be some crazy people out there that will go untreated. I would also challenge the notion that forced treatment is effective. I have had 100's of clients that were required to get counseling. Most of the time, they didn't want to be there and didn't get much out of services. Occasionally, I had someone that changed their mnd and put forth some effort, but they were the exception. You can't make someone want to get better.