I don’t disagree nor know enough to agree. The relationship of means vs. incidence is outside of my concerns as my personal main concerns and world view are not pro or anti gun.
I am involved because I use mental health services to help with attention issues and don’t like my rights to due process being randomly sacrificed and have friends who didn’t seek help for depression because they were afraid of the social costs and killed themselves.
Hopefully someone else will be willing to debate on the merits of gun control. I just want people to feel safe when they need to access medical care.
They also don’t have near the number of murders by non-gun means. Simply put, we have more violence in the US than they do, with or without guns, so I don’t think the correlation and causation are as coupled as you are implying.
I agree that the issue isn’t mental health or mental healthcare wrt mass shootings in the US, but I think it’s a deeper issue than that we simply have guns while they have gun control. Take those guns away and we’d STILL outstrip either country in the amount of murders by a huge number (probably at least an order of magnitude…IIRC, the US has something like 6k murders by knives or other non-gun weapons each year).
I would suspect that “mental health” is an issue in the USA because we have created a hyper-competitive, grossly unequal society where health care is prohibitively expensive and your livelihood can be terminated at a moment’s notice with no recourse and little support.
We are a country where nearly half the voters elected arguably one of the worst people in America to the most powerful job in the world, who then proceed to pretend that we haven’t been watching this person act this way publicly for the past 30 years.
These same people believe that we are “safer” by allowing every lunatic in the country to acquire an arsenal.
IOW shootings are a symptom of a selfish, willfully ignorant, gun-obsessed culture that is under constant stress and immerses themselves in fantasy and disinformation. Giving everyone vouchers to see a therapist won’t solve that.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t true. Unless your grief, anxiety or fear of spiders is so severe the person has been “adjudicated as a mental defective” or "involuntarily committed to a mental institution.” Unless someone can post otherwise, I’m almost 99% sure that simply going to a therapist will not bring the police to take your guns.
One would expect, based on your post, that the US would lead the world in suicide and murders on a per capita basis as well as just general mayhem…and that we’d also have a lot more general unrest due to how ‘grossly unequal’ our society is. We have literally millions of gun owners and hundreds of millions of guns, which, based on your post, should translate into 100’s of thousands of gun deaths per year at least…maybe more (hell, if we were even talking 10% of self absorbed gun nuts as you describe going off the deep end we should be seeing 4 million gun incidents a year at least). However, that doesn’t seem to be the case, despite the fact that the US obviously is in the top 1 or 2 wrt guns per capita. How do you reconcile the data? Myself, I see it as a version of the white van is always at the corner, but I’m curious as to your thoughts…
Perhaps if we had better mental hygeine we’d see fewer people “snapping” and thus fewer people turning to violence and other maladaptive coping mechanisms (e.g., drugs and food).
Increased access to mental health counseling is just one way to do this. We could also promote more unstructured playtime in grammar school in addition to better art, music, and physical education. Kids need to be learning stress management from day one. And we need to be teaching and encouraging kids to talk about their feelings. If it is obvious that a kid is struggling with this, they need to be flagged for intervention. Being able to put one’s feelings to words is another form of literacy that we should be teaching. This doesn’t require a psychotherapist. Just a teacher equipped with the right teaching materials.
A lot of mental health “best practices” could be incorporated in the classroom, but much of it needs to happen in the home. Parents need more and better resources to help with troubled children, but I think lots of parents would benefit from their own psychological interventions. Whenever I see mothers cussing out their kids at the grocery store, I always wonder if they are simply carrying out the abuse they received as kids. Perhaps if they had access to some decent therapy, they would be able to break the “fucked up person” cycle. Or, maybe they are just stressed out by economic woes and inflicting that stress on their kids. Perhaps a society that removed the “woefulness” of economic setbacks would have fewer fucked-up people.
We don’t have to wait for people to “snap” to do something. We could prevent “snapping” just by making society more humane.
Herein lies a fundamental problem with viewing mental health in the paradigm of a medical pathology; I think we can all agree that someone who goes on an unprovoked shooting rampage against random people, or even a man who decides to murder his wife and children out of some kind of rage/guilt/desire to escape a marriage, as not thinking rationally. And while all people are irrational some of the time (and most are far less rational than they believe themselves to be), an actual, diagnosable “mental illness” pathology from the DSM-V may be difficult to apply, and a plan of treatment essentially impossible to impose. In the end, people who are “bad” (e.g. atavistically violent or disruptive) should be treated or dealt with in the manner that a) protects the public from harm, b) provides some efficacy in reducing dangerous behaviors, and c) gives that person whatever emotional relief or stability that will allow them to be a productive member of society, in that order. In some cases that may well be permanent incarceration because their behavior is uncontrollable or because they have no wish to avoid doing harm to others, and lacking any way to objectively see or experience what is going on inside someone’s head, we can only work from the basis of their behavior, whether we call that a mental disorder or just being a raging asshole.
There is a lot to be said for this. There are other cultures where weapons are readily available and yet experience a tiny fraction of the violent crime and mass shootings that the United States does. And curiously enough, most of the people who engage in mass shootings are not those who actively oppressed; aside from the handful of self-radicalized Muslim would-be terrorists, mass shootings, bombings, and other attacks are largely the domain of young-to-middle-aged white males whose dissatisfaction largely seems to come from social isolation or the adoption of extremist political beliefs and baseless conspiracy theories, and whose adoption of firearms and violence essentially parodies that of the icons of white male hero worship.
I’ve been around firearms and people who use them (professionally) all my life and I’ve never been concerned about people who shoot as a hobby, or sport, or to hunt, but the rise of people who seem to believe it is some kind of patriotic mandate to own as many AR-15 pattern rifles with bumpstocks as possible and who look forward to some kind of apocalyptic collapse of society so they can declare the entire world as a free fire kill box is a sign of a distinct lack of connection with reality.
And as much as the notion of “we need mental health, not gun control” follows every single mass shooting event, none of the people voicing this sentiment seem to put any energy following through with actually making mental health services more readily available once the incident falls out of the public consciousness. Which tells you everything about their actual interest in agenda in forestalling any discussion about rational methods to reduce or prevent such shootings if they would in any way implicate the ready availability of firearms or the responsibility of the gun industry in not taking any effort to limit access of firearms to unstable or ill-intentioned people.
I know the conversation is focused on the pathological mass-shooter, but I’d like folks to consider that pathology can manifest differently in different cultures and environments. There is no good reason to think that the suburban white kid who shoots up his school has “snapped” any more the urban black kid who shoots up a busy street via drive-by has. Maybe neither have “snapped”, a term that implies a mental breakdown of some type. Maybe it’s just that both have unhealthy coping strategies. Equip them with better coping strategies early on and perhaps neither would feel compelled to shoot anyone.
I too have been around people who use and own firearms for work, hobby, sport, hunting, etc. all of my life. These are the same people in my circle that buy AR-15’s. They aren’t waiting on the apocalypse, and all of my friends have a good grasp on reality. They own those types of guns because they believe they look cool, replicas of military grade weapons, etc. But primarily to shoot stuff at the range.
Possibly, but places like Japan also have a hyper competitive, highly materialistic culture and their murder rate is far lower.
It seems to be a little over 4000 murders from items other than firearms, but I see your point. Who knows how many of those 10,000 firearm murders would still happen, and the US murder rate is about 4x that of France or Germany.
Actually you can basically get anyone locked up in a mental health facility for a minimum of 3 days by simply calling 911 and telling them you think they may hurt themselves or someone else because of their mental state.
There the Drs are to determine whether they need to go to court and try to keep the person locked up longer.
Though this is more often simply used as a means of otherwise illegal detainment, it’s a favorite trick of police to remove someone from what they think may be a potential domestic violence scenario where no crime has occurred. It’s also commonly taken advantage of by kids/parents,. Boyfriend’s/girlfriends who simply want to punish each other for one reason or another since it requires no evidence to do other than someone saying the right words.
I haven’t even looked into how wrong this study is yet, but first tell me why he chose the dates 2009 to 2015? What is special about that specific time period and why is he ingoring other dates?
*We cover the period from the beginning of the Obama administration to the current date, from 2009 to the Charleston massacre (this matches the starting period for another recent study we did on US shootings and we chose that because that was the starting point that Bloomberg’s group had picked). The cases were complied doing a news search. The starting year was picked simply because Obama was making this claim and 2009 was the beginning of the Obama administration. It also matched the time frame of a recent Bloomberg report (a report that we evaluated here). *
As is often the case, I get to the end of a thread to see tgat monstro already said what I wanted to add.
Mental health is a consequence of culture as well as biology. The issue is less about treatment for accute disorders and more about stressful/harmful environments that invoke/encourage violent responses.
The type of help that the paranoid and the psychotic get is not bromide ridden talk therapy. It is hospitalization and powerful anti-psychotic medication.The can be hospitalized without their consent for a three day period if they are thought to be a danger to themselves or others so they can get the help quick.
The second point is the more important one in that lack of insight is one of the symptoms of some mental conditions. This means people are unlikely to get the help they need and are likely to reject the help offered. This is one reason the homeless problem is so bad. Laws need to be changed to make it easier to treat people against their will.
So what? Does that mean the people there are benighted savages who cannot be held responsible for their atrocities? This whole “developed nations” thing is just a form of bigotry.
This is true for almost all crime but mass shootings are an exception. Estimates range from 20% to 50% all mass shooters have some form of serious mental illness, whereas the population only has about 2%.
The FBI has extensively studied shooters and mass killers, and there’s one important finding that can sum up the collected wisdom on the subject, which is: no one just “snaps” and goes to shoot up a school. It requires planning and foresight. There are warning signs. People now act on those signs, and that is a big step in the right direction, but this takes it out of the mental health field to a degree and into law enforcement…a medico-legal gray area. Individual threat assessment is ideally performed by a crisis team according to FBI guidelines.
Elliot Rodger is one who had extensive mental health issues (with psychosis) but he also had extensive mental health care, and thus he can serve as a good example of how patient care alone may not fix angry asshole disease, especially when it depends on patients self-reporting. I believe we’re in the early stages of building a system to accommodate such threats, a kind of mashup of mental health, police, community, and emergency services.
Netflix has a series called “Don’t Call Me Crazy”, which documents teens in an in-patient mental health hospital in the UK. It’s astonishing how good and supportive the level of care is, especially when compared to what we have in the US. Kids with issues like schizophrenia are surrounded by supportive doctors to help them deal with their issues and come up with coping mechanisms. Kids stay in the hospital for months until they are well enough to leave. That’s the kind of mental health environment you would need to reduce mass shootings. Well before the person snaps, they would have likely been put in such a hospital when the issues were just starting and much more easily addressed. But with the way insurance works in the US, it is virtually impossible or cost prohibitive to get kids into that level of care unless the problem is very severe. A kid in the US who is just starting to hear voices will not get inpatient and dedicated care until the problem is so severe that they are a danger to society (and then it will probably be from a prison doctor).