It’s not funds. It’s availability of care. There are three hospitals in my city, and a couple more within a 20 miles radius. Only one has a mental health ward. It has about three dozen beds. The next nearest hospital with a mental health ward is fifty miles away, and has two dozen beds. The closest after that is several hundred miles away. Funding or not, there are less than 100 hospital beds in mental health wards within a couple hundred miles of me.
I know the availability offhand because there have been times when my ex-wife was in danger of harming herself and her doctor had to determine if it was such a danger that it was worth sending her to a Chicago hospital, 350 miles away, since there were nothing open closer than that. Clearly the limited availability does impact the system and help available.
Keeping in mind, of course, these are short term care facilities. Long term care seems to be even worse AFAIK.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that this shooter didn’t get help for his obvious mental illness. The current system makes it pretty hard to get any help, and it’s not directly because of the mentally ill’s inability to pay.
No clue about Illinois but in my experience if the state mental hospitals were filled up (they were 100% of the time) there was a massive list of hospitals which could receive the overfill.
Too far away? Well, I’ll be honest if someone is in need of serious mental health services and they or their loved ones think a long drive is too much hassle then I don’t think they are part of a population that are ever going to be served well.
If you don’t actually do something that brings about official notice (attempt to kill yourself, attempt to harm others etc), and you aren’t willing to go to the effort of getting service no system is going to help you.
FWIW as I said or at least hinted at, the reason there are fewer psychiatric hospitals is because people felt that it was immoral to have people in them. Now the ones that do exist really only handle people have been sent there by the criminal courts or who have been escalated up to the highest levels and received a civil commitment.
If you’re thinking that you need a bed in a psych hospital, you can thank the reformers of the 70s and community mental health for getting rid of them. From everything I saw at the time it had very little to do with funding, in fact community based mental health is very expensive (and usually provided by quasi-governmental entities that are in it to make money) and states pay out tons for it.
It’s not that we should punish the right-wing fucktards for saying this shit, but do we have to reward them by electing them, giving them multi-million dollar contracts on TV networks, and prominently displaying their books in the front stores of windows? Maybe someone can point me to the show hosted by Malcom X on the oh so liberal news networks.
Yep. Just like whatever motivates anyone to take advantage of a sad situation like this for political reasons.
Talk about your partisan rhetoric, sheesh. :rolleyes:
OK, I’ll just throw one out there, trying to be fair and balanced here. The right extremists used the same faulty logic throwing political grenades after a Florida school board shooting a month ago. “if it wasn’t for the (Liberally created) poor economy, unemployemt, blah, blah, blah…” Fotunately the unemployed perp was the only one who ended up dead that day. Turns out he was a certified miscreant with a long criminal and mental illness history.
The only thing these incidents prove as far as “2A solutions” is concerned is that if more law-abiding people actually carried guns the outcomes might be very different.
Because that genie left the bottle a long time ago. How do you stop sane people with guns from losing their minds for whatever reason and using them like this? The questions get harder and more complicated the deeper you get into it. IMO, this thread seems to be more about the 1st amendment. Which gets enforced by the 2nd. There’s no controlling what people say or do about it, crazy, illegal or not. Segueing the alternate same cliche - that horse left the barn…
True, but a very basic doesn’t follow causal reduction in this context. Lots of things make people crazy. So what if politics is to blame? Murder statistics are just so many numbers and reports in databases all over the country. Mass killings in shopping malls and schools? May seem callous, but yeah, shyt happens. Could have been a jilted lover, druggie, space alien afficianado or any of dozens of other crazies walking the streets. With guns. To carry your premise a step further, we should now going forward, be more watchful of all conservatives and Republicans due to a propensity for morphing into homicidal maniacs?
First, it should be noted that none of the major RW Blowhards being discussed here (Palin, Limbaugh, Beck, Angel) either ran for office, or won in their last attempt to do so.
Second, “we” like to think we don’t censor people. So yes, “we” do have to allow them to get big bucks on cable news and make gazillions off their books.
No argument that the ignorant and hateful are responsible for their own ignorance and hate. But do those who help stoke it have no responsibility? :dubious:
In Illinois, the list is 3 hospitals outside of Chicago. St Louis has some I’m sure, but then you cross the state border which most likely has legal issues associated with it.
Realistically, the only decision a patient or their family makes is to call an ambulance/go to the emergency room for mental health reasons. After that, the doctors make all decisions. Sure, they’ll consult with the patient and family members, but they make the decisions. If the patient or family disagree with the doctors, the patient will be held against their will for several days and the it becomes a court issue. In which case it is a judge making the decisions.
Which is as it should be. I’m not complaining. Someone in danger of harming themselves or others shouldn’t be able to stroll out of the hospital at will. I’m just saying, the distance was the doctors concern, not me or my wife. I would have driven her halfway across the nation if I had to. Clearly, at least in some cases, the medical system itself is concerned about the limited care available.
Which is all getting off topic. I think the original point was that I’m concerned someone with obvious mental health issues like this fucking wacko had was not hospitalized. Knowing what I do about the availability of support, I’m not surprised, but I am concerned.
John Wilkes Booth was left wing? Go back read Mien Kemp, you still have some catching up to do. Apparently abortion and communism arent the only showstoppers for the Palin crowd, a modicum a culture is as well.
“IF” he was a political operative, he is a very stupid one.
“IF” he was a political operative intent on destroying Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords then why did he only shoot her once, and then shoot his gun 18 more times at OTHER people like old retired people and a 9 year old girl?
“IF” Congresswoman Gabrielle was his political target, then he would have emptied his gun, ONLY, on Gabrielle and Gabrielle would have been shot 19 times instead of just once.
Although I see what those links are saying, I still think there’s a difference between targets (which are used in such conflict-riven places as box store logos) and crosshairs: to say that the difference between them is hairsplitting seems to be missing the cultural significance of them. Targets have long since lost any requisite association with violence: when I buy socks and see a target logo on the package, I’m really not thinking about ranged weapons. But crosshairs still maintain that connotation.
In any case, I think the infamous Palin map is among the less offensive examples of violent rhetoric. “Second amendment remedies” is among the more offensive.
And even if there’s a completely successful tu quoque, all that means is that all sides need to tone down the rhetoric. I kinda like what the Coffee Party says.
“IF” he was a political operative, he is a very stupid one.
“IF” he was a political operative intent on destroying Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords then why did he only shoot her once, and then shoot his gun 18 more times at OTHER people like old retired people and a 9 year old girl?
“IF” Congresswoman Gabrielle was his political target, then he would have emptied his gun, ONLY, on Gabrielle and Gabrielle would have been shot 19 times instead of just once.
Even more importantly, if he was a political operative, then why pick on a conservative Democrat Blue Dog like Gabrielle who voted against Pelosi and who is outspoken against massive federal budget spending deficits?
My bad for not editing that quote. I really only wanted to respond to the last part, and not the links. I was just too lazy to edit them out. What I’m talking about is that the “war terminology” in politics is nothing new.
Agreed. And while we tend to want to have a nice, neat explanation for the tragedies we endure, the kind of folk-sociology being exhibited in this thread doesn’t strike me as valid. The crazies have a banquet to feast upon in the real wing-nut world, as well as the delusions festering inside their heads. This guy seems to be a prime example with his rants about mind control and brain washing. The crumbs offered up by the Palins and Angels aren’t what send these guys over the edge.
Oh, I don’t doubt that there aren’t many state hospitals. Like I said, people specifically campaigned against the very existence of mental hospitals throughout the 60s and 70s and they largely won.
I’ll say I think a lot of it lead to a lot of good, I know a woman that worked in a state mental hospital in the early 70s and she said that the way people were treated and housed there was atrocious. Obviously we can all remember some of the movies, news articles, books et cetera that were written about the deplorable conditions in mental hospitals around that time.
However I also think it lead to us closing a lot of mental hospitals that we probably should have upgraded, modernized, and converted into more humane treatment centers. However, the campaigners for community mental health by and large are the ones who fought vigorously against anything that kept the old system of mental hospitals up and running. So we’re now in a situation in which pretty much every one of the fifty states has a handful of mental hospitals. Since criminal courts can remand persons into their custody, in some states you’re seeing more than 50% of beds in state mental hospitals permanently occupied by criminal commitments which leaves very little room for regular citizens who need that level of intensive care.
Yeah, but doctors should and can have people put in community mental health. If there’s considered to be an imminent danger of self harm though, at least where I worked, we had to pay a non-psychiatric hospital to house the person until a psych bed opened (the costs were exorbitant and were something like 8x the cost per day of a bed in a psychiatric ward or hospital.)
However, in your wife’s case you have a family member who was concerned and saw a problem, and your wife also had concerns. Even under the system we had in the 70s and earlier when it was very easy to have someone committed, it still required that one of these things happened: 1) The person does something to bring official attention (commits a crime, is picked up by police for their own safety, is admitted to the hospital after an attempted suicide), 2) the person themselves recognizes they need help and goes to a hospital, 3) the person’s friends or family recognize they need help and go to a hospital. Unfortunately, you can be extremely mentally ill and not hit any of these three scenarios.
Generally speaking just because you’ve acted so bizarre you get kicked out of school, that doesn’t result in the authorities trying to have you civilly committed in this day and age. That’s a patient’s right’s issue and not an ‘access to care’ issue.
If Loughner had done something serious in his past, that would have received police attention (say he tried to harm himself or others, or was picked up because he was seen wandering the streets in a psychotic state) then he would have been committed. However, lots of profoundly mentally ill people who have violent tendencies may go years without actually being violent, and persons with tendencies to self harm may likewise go years without trying to self harm.
If Loughner wasn’t doing something to get the attention of the authorities, I really don’t see how having a mental hospital on every street corner would have helped him. For someone who wasn’t doing enough to get the attention of authorities it basically comes down to friends and family or the patient recognizing they need help. The mentally ill sometimes indeed realize they need help and will go into voluntary commitment, but many times that isn’t the case. Sadly some types of parents don’t like to admit their children have a problem, and will ignore glaringly obvious signs of mental illness, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case with Loughner’s parents. He’s 22 years old and from what I understand hadn’t moved out of his parent’s house yet, it’s highly unlikely they were unaware of his mental health issues. The more likely scenario is they were the type of parents who did not want to see their son committed, it brings a lot of shame to many families so they’ll ignore very obvious signs of profound mental illness. The mentally ill often will not have many friends because their behavior can be so inappropriate socially, so it’s unlikely Loughner had many friends who would be looking out for him.
The right extremists used the same faulty logic throwing political grenades after a Florida school board shooting a month ago. “if it wasn’t for the (Liberally created) poor economy, unemployemt, blah, blah, blah…” Fotunately the unemployed perp was the only one who ended up dead that day. Turns out he was a certified miscreant with a long criminal and mental illness history.