Inadequate gun control is only one half of the story. The other is the shameful job America does of treating the mentally ill. Today, 45 million American adults suffer from mental illness. Eleven million of those cases are considered serious. Most of these people are not dangerous, but if they can’t get treatment, the odds of potential violence increase.
Yet the mentally ill are finding it increasingly difficult to get help. Mental health funding has been plummeting for decades. Since 2009, states have cut billions for mental health from their budgets. As Daniel Lippman has reported in the Huffington Post:
Across the country, states facing severe financial shortfalls have cut at least $4.35 billion in public mental health spending from 2009 to 2012, according to the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD). It's the largest reduction in funding since de-institutionalization in the 1960s and '70s. In fiscal year 2012 alone, 31 states that gave their numbers to the association reported cutting more than $840 million.
Thanks to the misguided austerity policies embraced by conservatives, more people are falling through the cracks. There are not enough psychiatric beds, treatment services or community support programs. Medication is expensive, and insurance companies routinely leave patients inadequately covered (the Affordable Care Act will hopefully address this problem by finally putting psychiatric illnesses on par with other health issues).
Mental healthcare workers have been laid off. Vulnerable people are neglected until their situation becomes acute – often after it’s too late. Many are incarcerated, often subjected to solitary confinement because prison officials don’t know what to do with them. Others are homeless – as many as 45 percent of the people living on the streets suffer from mental illness.
I actually do a lot of work with the mental health community here in Alaska and I can attest to the lack of funding as well as to the fact that money is often misspent on programs or therapeutic approaches that have little positive impact on the client, yet provide tantalizing billing opportunities.
It is also very difficult for parents to get mental health resources for their children until they have acted up in a way that attracts the attention of school officials and mental health professionals. Of course by then the child is in crisis and often requires an evaluation at a hospital or mental health facility, after which there may be numerous medicinal and therapeutic opportunities made available to them, but there is no guarantee it will have the desired affect of making the child in need less a danger to himself or to his community.
Medications do not heal, but they do suppress, and sometimes that is the best that a parent can hope for. Though long term, as the child matures, the impact of the medications may change, or even become ineffective.
There is also a lack of follow up care for when a person no longer qualifies for services as a child. These patients who "age out" of a system that is designed to meet the needs of a certain age group, may find themselves without as much, if ANY access to mental health services as a young adult.
That, married with their rebellious desire to prove that they don't need anymore doctors, parents, and therapists telling them what to do, may result in a tragic circumstance that finds their path to further support taking them through the legal system, which is set up for criminals, NOT those with issues of mental health.
So yes I think that the pathway to doing something truly impactful to curb this incredible surge in handgun violence is twofold. One is to definitely put some serious restrictions on access to guns in this country, and the other is to make access to appropriate and beneficial mental health services easier, more affordable, and more readily available.
When I was working on my psych degree, I wrote a paper about the negative impacts of de-institutionalizaion. The events of December 14th clearly put to rest the misguided (and lazy-minded) contention that drugs alone are enough to prevent such occurrences from happening.
ReplyDeleteYet another Reagan legacy.......
ReplyDelete... and people call me crazy when I identify him as The Beast. Tch tch.
DeleteYou know what else has happened? School nurses disappeared in the 80's (we had one at all times when I was in elementary school in the 60's.) And in the 90's we started phasing out counselors. Now in my town where there used to be six, two at each middle school, there are TWO covering the same three schools. Our 1600 student high schools used to have 6, which meant each student got five minutes a year..now there is one at each school to write recommendations, help with scheduling, AND see students who are in pain or thinking of suicide, or worse. So where we once were able to intevene early, the best time, we now do not intervene unless the student brings a gun to school (which will be permitted as soon as ALEC's newest Puppet, Snyder, signs a law admitting guns to preschools, schools, libraries..you know all the places where children congregate to feel safe? Is the ulterior motive to drive people OUT of public school and into the religious arms of the right's charter and home schools?
ReplyDeleteIt was the work of evil. Let's call it what it is.
ReplyDeleteCalling something evil is a cop out and demonstrates a naivete about how mental illness and the human mind work.
DeleteThis was the consequence of lack of mental health care, lack of evaluation of those with potential to harm others, and many other factors we don't know yet. People are born with genetic predisposition, then environmental factors determine the outcome.
DeleteI was lucky enough to have an absolutely amazing insurance plan when I was younger and still insured under my fathers plan.
ReplyDeleteI never had to worry that a test, exam, or medication was covered. I never needed a referral. And when I needed to go to therapy for my panic attacks, or my eating disorder, there were no deductibles, only a $20 copay per visit.
My younger brother is still covered under my fathers insurance, and he recently came to my mother and told her that he needs to talk someone.
And while he never needs to worry about not being covered for any medical reasons, we were absolutely shocked to learn that there is now a THOUSAND DOLLAR deductible for ANY mental health related services. We don't have that kind of disposable income right now, and we were worried that he wouldn't be able to get the mental help that he needed. Luckily, however, we found a psychologist who offered us his services, without going thru insurance, for $40 a visit.
I had been in and out of therapy for years, and it had helped me immensely. As has my mother. And we are so grateful to have found a psychologist who was willing to look past his profits to help a young man get through a hard part of his life.
Thats exactly it. My husband was clean for many years but suffered a relapse in 2007. $1000 deductable for rehab. Needless to say we couldnt afford it watched him go through withdrawl for two weeks. He still struggles. Good man, works hard, a dirty little secret. I cant help but wonder if I could have gotten him the treatment then...
ReplyDeleteI keep hearing that the shooter had Asperger's Syndrome, and having worked with people on the Autism spectrum, there's no way it was just Aspergers alone. Those kids may act out from frustration, but they don't have the capability of thinking out all the details of this attack and implement them. It's a neurological deficit, not a behavioral/emotional issue.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, thanks for an excellent post. We lost a family member who suffered for years with Paranoid Schizophrenia and Manic Depression. He stopped taking his medication, when his family had him hospitalized, it was like a revolving door.
We need to open a national discussion about mental health and fund programs to help people and families cope.
He sounds more like he had a schizophrenia spectrum type personality disorder that probably deteriorated to psychosis. In many of these situations drugs are involved due to self medication. Even marijuana can be a problem for Schizophrenics. He was also the perfect age to develop schizophrenia.
DeleteMy stepson is a paranoid schizophrenic and we begged for help time and again from everyone we could think of to help him. I always knew he would murder someone and he did most brutally. Because for several years, we tried over and over again and no one in authority would listen to us, an innocent person was most heinously killed. And now our son sits in a mental hospital, waiting to be made competent enough to stand trial. Our system is badly broken.
ReplyDeleteVery sorry for your loss and your terrible tragedies. All the best to you.
DeleteJennifer aka Media Insider
Thank you Jennifer.
DeleteI am so sorry to hear this, as he would have most likely been perfectly safe on meds. People don't understand the pain families go through trying to help their children and begging for help especially once they are legally adults and can do whatever they want. The stress of knowing something will happen and not being able to do anything about it is horrendous and then it happens and they act like it was out of the blue rather than predictable.
DeleteThat's is so tragic and wrong that you were not able to get the attention of a medical person that would help you find treatment in the mental health arena. My sorrow and heartfelt compassion are with you. But, I am curious what state you live in that the agencies were so ignorant to not heed a parent's concerns.
Delete"Mass shootings by definition share a theme of mental health deficiencies, but they account for a very small amount of all gun deaths in the US, perhaps 3/10ths of 1%. While I am all for improving a woefully deficient system of addressing mental illness in the US, I am very uncomfortable with this meme that seems to be gaining steam that mental illness is at the core of our entire gun problem in the US, and that sensible gun regulation is therefore not needed.
ReplyDeleteI was tipped off when the NRA ballyhooed this theory the same day as the attack as a grand diversionary tactic. "Gun violence is all because of mental illness, so let's exclusively address that issue. Our laws are fine." That meme seems to be an exceedingly transparent attempt to legitimize any other use of a gun, which could include protection, crime, coercion, and political activity (war).
In other words, all the ways the gun crowd would tend to use their own guns.
An important statistic which I have never seen a single member of the gun crowd adequately address, is that America's rate of violent gun deaths is 20 times as high as the average of the 38 developed nations that have instituted common sense gun regulation. Excessive gun ownership in itself translates directly to a drastic increase in both violent crimes and gun deaths.
Regulation works to reduce gun violence and deaths across nations and across cultures. It would work for us too, but we lack the political will to try it. Blaming mental illness for the various social ills resulting from unrestricted access to guns is a major cop out.
~ Kerry"
While the majority of shootings in the US are not related to the severely mentally ill, this kind, muder/suicide is almost exclusively done by those who are psychotic, have PTSD from workplace bullying (with a psychotic or dissociative event)or other trauma and may have drugs that contribute to violence involved.
DeleteThank you for all the work you do in this community, Gryphen, and for continuing to post about developments and problems within it. Please keep doing this! :)
ReplyDeleteIf about 50 million folks in the US are known to suffer from some type of mental illness, and that's just people who have been diagnosed, most likely, that's one of out six people at least in the U.S. That's a crisis of enormous proportions. Yet somehow we don't consider it a health issue, or the average person whose life hasn't been touched by this has been programmed to just shrug and go, "Oh, there's medication for that, so no need to think about it anymore."
Meanwhile, all of us who have seen people go on and off meds for disorders like bipolar issues, schizophrenia, and extreme things in the autism spectrium know firsthand that meds are quite often not terribly helpful, need constant tweaking which creates great disruption and lack of continuity for the poor person trying to get well and their family; and then lately I've been seeing people who finally found a medication that worked well for them and then the medication is discontinued or goes generic and the person can't get the original formulation anymore, and goes back into having to find a new "recipe" to help them. Richard Dreyfuss talked about this a while back; he had finally found a med that really helped his bipolar disorder and then they stopped making that med, so it was back to square one. The poor guy said that he had had to "bare knuckle" it ever since he couldn't get that med because he still hadn't found one that worked right with his particular brain chemistry. Can you imagine having to live like that? The problems that happen with work, family life, and just day to day well-being when your brain chemistry is always going through such extreme changes?
We need MASSIVE education about this stuff and massive investment in alternative types of treatment -- especially with one in six Americans being affected (conservatively.) Then you have one in 80 kids being diagnosed on the autism spectrum now and this is a huge crisis in the making.
Jennifer aka Media Insider