It's not about guns and CCW, it's about ignoring mental illness

[proud2BlibKansan]

Until Reagan closed asylums and threw the mentally ill out in the streets, we didn't have to worry much about a madman (or madwoman) getting a gun and going to their neighborhood mall and shooting innocent people. We had hospitals and we could also go to court and ask that the mentally ill be sent to a hospital for short periods of time for observation.

All that has changed. Now we no longer have these hospitals, and it is nearly impossible to have anyone placed under court ordered observation in a psychiatric facility.

I am old enough to remember when we didn't have homeless people on our streets. That is a relatively new phenomenon. Now they are seemingly everywhere. Anyone who doesn't believe that most of our homeless are mentally ill or dealing with addictions doesn't know many homeless people. Since we have no hospitals for them, they live on our streets.

And it is so easy for anyone, including the mentally ill, to get a gun. That used to be harder too.

But what happened in Omaha and what happened at Virginia Tech wasn't about the ease of these two shooters getting a gun as much as it is about two very seriously ill young people who our society failed because they had untreated mental illnesseses. That is the real tragedy.

I work with kids who have emotional disturbances. Some are mentally ill. So I know first hand what a poor job we do of providing care for these children and interventions for their families. The real heartbreaker is that without their parents' consent, we can do nothing to help these children. One of my kids is suicidal and has made several threats, yet since his parent doesn't believe a kid his age can really commit suicide, he refuses to get help for his child. And there is not a thing we can do, other than to continue to try to persuade the parent that his child is very seriously ill and is crying out for help.

And this is definitely the kind of kid who will get a gun and shoot people in a mall one day. Don't say I didn't warn you.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. This is so true

I also recall when mentally ill people were placed in institutions and actually got help for their illnesses--and I recall when Reagan closed them down, and how distraught the caregivers were. Giving mentally ill people no options leaves them and society at large in danger.

[madokie]

2. so true

[ladjf]

3. You are among the few who has the history of this problem

accurate back to the Reagan era. Thanks for the good post.

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. Actually Carter started the ball rolling

and Reagan just finished the work.

But in all fairness, there was an effort on a national scale to close down institutions that served our mentally ill and disabled since so many of them were horrible places. And instead of cleaning them up, we shut them down.

Geraldo Rivera won an Emmy in the 70s for his reports on a horrid facility in upstate NY. So we can blame Geraldo instead of Reagan if we want :)

[ladjf]

19. I don't recall Carter being part of the trend to shut down mental

health facilities.

[proud2BlibKansan]

22. It started when he was president

and he wasn't really directly involved but there were efforts to clean up mental institutions while he was in office. Congress dropped the ball as well. There was a successful effort to place the responsibility on states and local jurisdictions. When Reagan came into office, this plan just fit very nicely into his goal to reduce the size of the government and fund fewer social programs. So it wasn't Reagan's idea but the hospitals were closed while he was president.

This issue had been stirring for many years. We had neglected and ignored our mentally ill and our disabled by allowing them to "exist" in horrific facilities that make today's animal kennels look good. It was a two tier system, with the wealthy getting the cadillac facilities and everyone else treated in the gross hospitals. And families and others lobbied for years to change the system. However, I do feel fairly certain that dismantling the system was never their intent.

I don't believe we need to go back to the way it was. When I was a kid in the 60s, we had a neighbor who had post partum depression and she just went away to a hospital and never came home. The dad raised the baby and we never saw the mother again. I think of her every time I hear of women who have this condition and I wonder if she really needed to be permanently removed from her family.

I also had a good friend growing up who had a little sister with Down's Syndrome. She stayed at home while her siblings went to school. Disabled kids had no rights to public education back then. Many were merely institutionalized.

So the old system was broken. I honestly don't remember a public outcry when Reagan closed the hospitals and turned mental health care over to states and local communities.

[johnnie]

4. I just wonder what they can do

Both the Omaha shooter and the VT shooter had some treatments in their history. The Omaha shooter had four years of it from what I have heard. The guy who went into Clinton's headquarters last week was also under doctors care but he didn't take his meds.

I am also concerned about the way that mental illness is treated in this country, but what can you do about people who refuse to take their medication or refuse treatment?

[proud2BlibKansan]

6. Lock them up

I have a sibling who is mentally ill and our family makes sure she takes her meds. If she chooses not to, she knows there are consequences. (We bribe her by paying her car insurance and buying her things she needs, etc) But she also knows we will take her to court and ask a judge to commit her if we need to.

And she has been med compliant for nearly 30 years now.

When it comes to the kids I work with, if their parents thought their children would be removed from their homes if they didn't get them the care they need, then those kids would be getting care. There are no consequences for parents who ignore their mentally ill kids. And damnit, there should be.

[AuntPatsy]

10. Sometimes it is not so easy pB, actually I am in the position right now

having to deal with a similar problem, its a really long tale but suffice it to say that fighting the system to get the help that's needed is like pulling your teeth all by your lonesome....I have hit so many brick walls that I've lost count, obviously I am still attempting to get help for my daughter but it's not been easy and the court system does not always work to your advantage believe me, regardless of the history of the person..

And bribing does not work very well in my situation, she could care less, its a pretty crazy situation, one that I was in no way prepared to have to face but what I have leaned is that there are thousands out there that are just as ignored and not given a second thought.

And I believe the government should be made to face these consequences you speak of, how dare they ignore a problem that at times if virtually impossible to deal with. My goodness even the doctors I have gotten her too can't figure out a damn thing.

[proud2BlibKansan]

11. I know it's not easy

but we clearly need to do more. Lots more than what we are doing now.

[johnnie]

13. But take for example this Omaha shooter

He was 19 I believe, and he had treatment in the past. Who was responsible after he came of age? I'm not saying what you say is wrong or trying to butt heads, but I think that mental health has many issues that need to be worked on. For example, and I know I will probably get shit for this but, it takes nothing to get anti-depressant meds from doctors these days. They gave me some after I went in for a hernia, figure that one out?

I think there is an anti-depressant medication epidemic out there and by these doctors giving them out like they are candy makes mental illness something that is considered normal. Seriously, I know many people on anti-depressants because of relationship problems. In fact most people I know who take them started to after the went through a breakup and couldn't cope. I'm not saying that maybe they weren't depressed, but I think society in general has forgotten how to cope with emotions.

Because of this I think when people hear that someone is mentally ill, they don't look at it for what it really is because they themselves are on meds because they lost their job a month ago and can't cope. Am I making sense?

I agree that our health care in this country needs an overhaul, but I think that a place to start is the pharmaceutical companies and them forcing anti-depressants down our throats. And the doctors who are probably getting kickbacks from giving everyone these drugs.

[proud2BlibKansan]

24. Yes you are making sense

While we do perhaps over diagnose and over prescribe anti-depressants, we are under diagnosing our severely mentally ill. They are on our streets.

This hits close to home for me as I have a severely mentally ill sibling and my family has been struggling with her for nearly 30 years now. And we were very fortunate to be able to afford what was considered "the best" care for her when she first got sick. But even with excellent care, she is not med compliant without much pressure from us in her family.

The fact is that the ones who really do need the meds are more likely to refuse to take them. And to refuse to get help.

I also think we all need to remember that lesson in Psych 101 when they taught the difference between neurosis and psychosis. In our society, the neurotic get care. The psychotic do not.

[EFerrari]

7. I would weep if I wasn't so burned out from dealing with this problem.

I watched my ex be 100% willing to get treatment at every point and be so mishandled that I ended up in the ER on multiple occasions. I'm lucky to be alive, no kidding. I can't even begin to describe what that was like except officialdom kept telling me to just get out as if that would resolve the situation. Unfucking real. Okay, so I turn him out. Then, what, motherf#ckers?

As if my husband would be miraculously healed if I left him? Hello? McFly? :shrug:

They did their best to isolate him and invalidate me -- because that's a solution. :sarcasm:

That's just unacceptable. We have the friggin' technology to treat people. It's right there. But we don't deliver it.

Those people who died didn't have to die. Our government's policy killed those people as surely as if some functionary pulled that trigger. We don't prioritize mental illness. People die, they go homeless, we don't pay attention. It's not our problem, or so we think until someone we care about gets killed.

How stupid is it to allow people to be shot in public places instead of delivering the tech that we have? Who is calling these shots?

It's a choice we're making, today.

[proud2BlibKansan]

12. I know you understand the system and how screwed up it is

:hug:

[EFerrari]

15. I don't mean to be a pain but no thanks to our system that

I'm even here to post.

I could have gotten good and dead on many occasions. And it was never for Doug's lack of willingness.

It was because this whole system doesn't CARE or attend to us and because no one holds the system responsible.

I don't even want to say how many times I dealt with psychotic, violent episodes, all on my unprofessional own, with no support at all. Broken bones, face changed, it was a decade of majorly trying just to stay alive. Trying to find any help and there was nothing or, precious little.

About two years ago, I read in my paper that a mom had killed her schizophrenic son and then, herself because she was just exhausted and couldn't see a future. These shootings or other killings shouldn't surprise any of us. Just blocks away from this desk. She took care of him for years and, one day, it was just too much to do alone. I was on that path.

We just should never be surprised at these incidents if we are honest. As a society, we have chosen to ignore mental illness. We reap what we sow.

[AuntPatsy]

18. Wow, I am so sorry to hear what you have gone through and continue

to go through, there are so many valid and extremely important issues such as your husbands that need attention, yet, nothing, in fact, everytime I turn around, the little support that is still out there gets less and less and less.

We have so much we need to fight for, so many that cannot fight for themselves, when we will as a nation and as fellow countryman realize that the most important issues facing us today are NOT GAY Marriage, NOT abortions, NOT a stupid fight on Christmas, my God, what is wrong with people today? Talk about needing to get their priorities in order...

But again, until something touches them, hits them personaly, an issue that needs attention and yets is ignored, they will continue to stage stupid protests and waste valuable time on those above issues the church leaders tell them are so much more important, they are so pathetic and so selfish, sometimes God forgive me I wish Karma would catch up to those type.

[proud2BlibKansan]

20. And I watch these kids grow up to be the dangerous adults we fear

Last year, I had one who threatened to kill his mom, his dad, the principal and me at a meeting in front of ten people. And he went home with his mom and dad and no care was recommended or provided. This year I have a kid who is suicidal.

And the way the system "works" is that if the parent doesn't seek care, none is provided. The reality is that most parents are in denial. There is nothing wrong with their kid! And if they are not willing to admit there is a problem and their kid needs care, then their kid gets no care.

We can call family services or child protective services but there is only so much they will do, if they even choose to file a report. Those case workers are paid even less than teachers and are unbelievably overwhelmed. They did take a report on our suicidal kid. We told them he is not taking any meds and his psych did a tox screen on him which proves that. So the caseworker went to the house and because she saw bottles of meds prescribed for the kid, she assumed he was taking them.

Side note: 10 years ago, we had 3 kids at our school who were stealing food. They told us their mom wasn't feeding them. So the family services caseworkers went to their house and because there was food in the cupboard, they refused to do anything else. Those kids never came back to school. A week later, 2 of them were dead. Mom had starved one and beat the other because they had told us at school that she wouldn't feed them. And I don't think those caseworkers were even disciplined. I think they should be sharing Mom's prison cell!!

So we just get to watch while children are damaged in horrific ways and every time I hear of a horrible crime, I watch for the name of the criminal and pray it isn't a kid I once knew. Today my heart aches for the teachers in Omaha who knew 10 years ago that this kid needed help. I have been in their shoes and it isn't a very nice place to be.

[EFerrari]

21. I know. It isn't a good place to be when everyone pretends

you're invisible.

:hug:

[michreject]

17. How is your ex (?) now?

Sometimes it's best to get out while you can.

[EFerrari]

23. Getting "out" may solve your own situation but it doesn't resolve

the problem in society.

Does it? You're just handing off the problem. This is a small planet.

:shrug:

[AuntPatsy]

8. Thank you for speaking what I honestly believe to be the much bigger problem facing us today

And our government continues to ignore these people and the longer they continue to ignore them the more such incidents will occur.

[catmandu57]

9. My sister in law has mental issues

She was fine until a year ago, then she flipped out, really went over the edge and was hospitalized until she was stabilized, since then she has bounced from group home to group home and is a whisper away from being turned out onto the street because there isn't anywhere for her to go.
Her brother and father are so far to the right it's not funny, they are both feeling very guilty now, in the past they trumpeted the closing of the institutions and rah rahed the reptiles, now it's coming back to bite them on the ass.

When this started, brother was freaking that she would end up on an institution, he shut up pretty fast when i told him there were no institutions because people like him and his father cheer led to close them so they could get a tax cut. So, now she is on her last chance here, the next stop is Kansas City where she'll get dumped out on the street faster.

Back to the topic, yes it's about the availability of mental health treatment, that these individuals chose to violently act out and why is going to be lost in the gun argument and that's a shame.

[gratuitous]

14. Some of the solutions are politically unpalatable

First off, requiring mental health evaluations of every firearm purchaser. Uh oh.

Next, raising taxes (horror!) to fund treatment centers, inpatient and outpatient. This is truly one of those things that can't possibly be a profit center, so there isn't really a free market solution to treating the destitute mentally ill. Just like there isn't much profit to be made from treating the destitute physically ill. And with the Anti-Tax Machine going great guns (you should pardon the expression), it will be an uphill fight to persuade the population at large to fund this, just like funding health care for everyone is an uphill fight.

Once the funding is secured, where are we going to site facilities? Most mental health professionals agree that a supportive community is very advantageous for patients, but who wants a bunch of nutjobs, possibly violent nutjobs, living in their neighborhoods, sharing the streets with their precious little angel children? There's much groundwork to be done.

Perhaps in the aftermath of yet another massacre, more people might be more open to considering some of these points (and there are more than just these three, to be sure), but we have much work to do, mostly with undoing a lot of the selfishness that has been forcibly injected into our society over the last 30 years.

[Ron Green]

16. It's also about True Crime stories on television.

Wall-to-wall coverage of the killings in Omaha illustrate the fact that lurid entertainment, no matter how few people are actually affected, will play in our national information environment more prominently than stories of policy that affect millions and endanger our world.

I agree that mental health care, and lack thereof, is more significant than the availability of dangerous toys. But the corporate poisoning of the communal "well" is the worst crime of all.

[pitohui]

25. i dislike threatening people w. harm if they don't drug their brat

i'm uncomfortable w. the tone of your post which boils down to "ha ha you're going to get gunned down at the mall because you didn't keep this kid who is frustrating me drugged to the eyeballs"

we didn't worry about going to the mall and being gunned down by madmen before reagan because there were no malls, in the 1970s here in new orleans for example, people hung out at the lakefront, which was eventually made a private neighborhood where the public was unwelcome -- the mall as "commons" did not always exist

in any case we always hear these complaints that mental illness is untreated and it invariably proves untrue -- in both cases as far as i know the folks in question were receiving "treatment," the problem is that treatment doesn't always work and those who imagine that if everyone is drugged to their eyeballs everything will be OK are living in a dreamworld

we simply don't have effective treatments for all mental illnesses, i personally know people with medication resistant bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia and it isn't because i'm a doctor conversant with rare diseases, it's because this is just not all that uncommon -- in a large population some people will have diseases that we don't know how to treat and a fair minority of people w. mental illness have medication resistant variants -- pretending that mental illness is always easily cured is just a cruel hoax sometimes


liberals supported the closing of institutions because people were being caged there for a lifetime with no way out, once diagnosed with a supposed mental illness, even when they didn't belong there -- a notorious case in the 1970s was the discovery of a woman, now old (80s or 90s) who had been imprisoned for her entire lifetime because she spoke a nonsense language -- too late it was discovered the nonsense language was ukrainian and the woman wasn't ever crazy, the system that entombed her sometime around 1920 was what was crazy -- the example given above of the woman imprisoned for life for post partum depression is another one -- if you fund the mental institutions, people will be stuck in them, and it will often be the inconvenient people (the women who make too much noise, in america's history, or in russia, i guess it's the reporters who make too much noise)

there are good and sound reasons why we can't be quick to label people and shut them away forever just because of your fears, *i* made threats when i was younger as did a great many of us, and yet i have never killed anyone not even at a mall -- a lot of "mental help" for youngsters is really about silencing them and demanding more and more that they walk on eggshells or else be labeled for someone else's profit forever

[proud2BlibKansan]

26. I understand your concerns but disagree

I work with these kids. They are scary at age 8. I am working with one now who attacks his peers for no reason and without warning. And all we can do is send him home, encourage the parents of his victims to press charges (in the hope that the judicial system can help the kid) and pray his parent comes to his senses and gets his kid some professional help.

I am not talking about overactive little boys who are placed on ADD meds. I am not talking about kids who need counseling for mild depression and are medicated instead. I am talking about SERIOUSLY ill children who are screaming for help and getting none. Kids who make school a nightmare for their classmates. I have been in this business nearly 30 years and can honestly say that I know at least one kid every year who is very seriously mentally ill and getting no help.

I have seen these kids grow up and become criminals. Fortunately none I know have gone to malls and killed anyone. But they have murdered police officers and family members and motorists who cut them off in traffic, 10 years after I first met them as young children. One of my former students is now 20 and is in prison for life for shooting a man he was playing basketball with. The man fouled him and he pulled a gun and shot him. When this kid was 9, I literally begged his mother to get him some help. He was deeply deeply angry and took that anger out on someone nearly every day. But she was in denial. Now she visits him in prison.

As for malls, I live in the city that is home to the country's first shopping district and the oldest in the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_Club_Plaza http://www.experiencekc.com/shopping.html It was built in the 1920s. There is an indoor mall here that was built in 1959. http://www.wardparkwaycenter.com/Index.asp?IdS=0003D6-3566C20&x=010|000&~=

So yes we have been going to malls for many many years now.

[blues90]

27. As I remember it it was Reagan who began shutting down these clinics

Also shortly after the HMO's came to be . Here in L.A. there were a few homeless but suddenly they were all over the place .

Another problem if you have insurance and need mental health care the first step is a short talk then a script is written and you get 10 visits per year . I know , I've gone through this many times .

so many programs have been cut in favor of wars .

I am also old enough where most homeless were considered hobo's and that was a chosen way of life for the most part , riding the rails .

The easy access to guns is another problem that cannot be ruled out either . Even with that said , there is no way to insure a persons stability in every given case , they may have no past but now days hit the breaking point for so many reasons , to many to list .