NOT MY pres drumpf's/trump's comments blaming mental illness for the mass shooting in Texas is amazing because one of his first actions as NOT MY pres was to"repeal an Obama administration rule that blocked gun sales to some people with mental health diagnosis". Those who continue to support and vote for the politicians who have been bought by the nra are as responsible as the murderers who commit these heinous crimes. One can only hope they have the courage to accept the responsibility for their actions if their families become victims of gun violence. From NPR, NBC News and Politico......
Texas Shooter's History Raises Questions About Mental Health And Mass Murder
Devin Kelley, the man we now know killed more than two dozen people at a Texas church on Sunday, escaped a mental health facility before the Air Force could try him on charges that he beat his wife and baby stepson back in 2012.
And President Trump, like many people before him, is pointing to mental health — not guns — as the cause of the church massacre.
"Mental health is your problem here. This was a very, based on preliminary reports, this was a very deranged individual, a lot of problems over a long period of time. We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries," he said in a news conference in Japan on Monday.
And yet the statistics don't bear this out. Yes, some people with mental illness become mass shooters but most people with mental health problems — which is estimated to be up to 18 percent of adults, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation — do not.
All Things Considered host Kelly McEvers talked with NPR health policy correspondent Alison Kodjak about the Trump administration's record on mental health care.
McEvers: So I want to start first with a fact check on what President Trump said — and other politicians too — that there's a direct link between gun violence and mental health. What do the experts say?
Actually, most mental health professionals would dispute that, says Kodjak.
In fact, "there is no real connection between an individual with a mental health diagnosis and mass shootings. That connection according to all experts doesn't exist," says Bethany Lilly of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law.
"Having all of our attention focused on mental illness is not particularly helpful," Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore, Md., told NPR Monday.
An issue brief from the Bazelon Center, written back in 2013 after the Newtown, Conn., massacre, says it's unfair to tie the two. "We know how to enable individuals with significant psychiatric disabilities to succeed," the paper says. It says services such as supported employment and housing, are very effective at keeping people with mental illness out of emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals and jails.
"Affording people with serious mental illnesses the services they need is a critical goal, but it is not a solution to gun violence," the report says.
That's not to say that people who commit mass shooting never suffer from mental health issues, Kodjak points out, in Texas and in other shootings.
But research shows that people who suffer from mental health issues such as bipolar disorder or anxiety are no more likely than the average person to become violent. And people with mental illness are ten times more likely to be victims of violent crime, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
McEvers: So what about the record of this White House on mental health?
One of the first thing President Trump did after taking office was to repeal an Obama administration rule that blocked gun sales to some people with mental health diagnoses.
As far as mental health care goes — the president's record isn't very strong if you measure it by where he puts federal money, Kodjak says.
He supports repealing the affordable Affordable Care Act, which for the first time required insurance companies to cover mental health care. The law also expanded that coverage to millions of people who didn't have it before.
McEvers: So a repeal of Obamacare could reduce access to mental health care. What other policies are being considered that might affect those who need mental health services?
The biggest is the proposed cuts to Medicaid that have been in all the GOP health care bills. They would reducing future Medicaid spending by hundreds of billions of dollars.
Today Medicaid pays for about 27 percent of mental health services, according to Lilly of the Bazelon Center, so cutting the program that much is likely to take money away from mental health care for the poor, Kodjak says.
I’m a Psychiatrist. Making Gun Violence About Mental Health Is a Crazy Idea.
Before the initial shock wore off in the aftermath of yet another horrific American mass shooting—before we knew about the extent of the injury and death, or the events that transpired or the biography and motives of yet another angry white male armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a grudge—before we really knew anything, President Donald Trump jumped into the fray with a diagnosis. “Mental health is your problem here,” Trump opined from Tokyo in his first comments after 26 people died when a gunman opened fire on a church service in Sutherland Springs, Texas. “This isn’t a guns situation,” he said. “This is a mental health problem at the highest level.”
Respectfully, Mr. President: It’s not that easy. As a psychiatrist who’s taken a hard look at the connection between mental health and gun violence, I’ve seen where this conversation leads, which usually involves trying to prevent “mentally ill” people from buying guns and involving mental health practitioners in that effort. I’ve also seen mental health invoked as an argument against gun control, because who can stop a crazy person from killing people anyway?
What I haven’t seen is a serious attempt to grapple with just how complex and fraught it is to come up with a policy that works. For example, there’s accumulating evidence that psychiatrists can’t predict violence from their patients. How are we supposed to intuit when someone with, say, severe depression is capable of mass murder? More broadly, I think I speak on behalf of many experts on mental health when I say I wish politicians and other public figures would stop using mental illness as a shield against talking about the complex social issues related to gun violence—mass shootings and also the everyday gun violence to which we’ve become accustomed—in America.
The mental health claim comes from both ends of the political spectrum. National Rifle Association President Wayne LaPierre faulted “delusional killers” for gun violence in the United States immediately after the school shooting at Sandy Hook, while calling for a “national registry” of persons with mental illness. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told reporters after the Sandy Hook school shooting, “People who have mental health issues should not have guns.” Cuomo backed a bill in the New York Senate that would have required mental health professionals to report “dangerous patients” to local officials. But defining a “dangerous patient” is a lot harder than it might seem.
Assailants in many high-profile U.S. mass shootings do have psychiatric histories. Alleged Texas shooter Devin Kelley once escaped from a mental health facility. James Holmes “was seeing a psychiatrist specializing in schizophrenia” before he opened fire in a crowded movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Jared Loughner, Adam Lanza, Isla Vista, California, shooter Elliot Rodger—all of these shooters, too, had histories suggestive of mental illness. In hindsight, these people should not have had access to weapons, and one would hope that a functioning system of background checks or registries might have raised more red flags.
But there are reasons why we psychiatrists so rarely endorse the simplistic “mental health problems cause mass shootings” argument, or its logical policy extension: that our mental health expertise should therefore be able to predict gun crime before it happens, and that psychiatrists should be a part of some sweeping dragnet to catch potential shooters or mass killers.
First, and perhaps most important, very little evidence supports the notion that mental illness in and of itself causes assaults on other people, let alone gun crimes or mass shootings. This makes sense when you think about it. No current psychiatric diagnosis manifests itself in core symptoms that include aggression toward others, and many mental illnesses in fact produce the opposite effect. Schizophrenia, for instance, is frequently marked by what are called negative symptoms, such as apathy and social withdrawal. Depression often produces low mood and low energy—sufferers fail to find enjoyment in things, and frequently just stay home. In this sense, many of the most common mental illnesses cause patients to withdraw from society, rather than violently attack it.
These kinds of symptoms help explain why national surveys of everyday U.S. gun violence frequently show persons diagnosed with mental illness vastly under-represented as perpetrators when compared with a far more volatile population: the sane.
If there were a Propensity to Mass Violence disease, perhaps it would make a little more sense to involve psychiatrists in identifying potential mass murderers. But absent a formal means of assessing predictive violence, such as a diagnosis, mental health practitioners are often left to trust the power of their observations when asked to gauge which one of the thousands of patients they see might go on to commit a violent act such as a mass shooting. And, unfortunately, we’re not that great at it. As gun expert Jeffrey Swanson succinctly puts it when summarizing a great deal of research, “psychiatrists using clinical judgment are not much better than chance at predicting which individual patients will do something violent and which will not.” Tragically, such knowledge is often gained only after the fact. And programs that attempt to force psychiatrists to report potential shooters—such as the one supported by Governor Cuomo in New York and similar programs in other states—often result in dramatic over-reporting of psychiatric patients, who are then added to government surveillance lists.
This is not to suggest that mental health practitioners are completely in the dark about risk factors for gun violence or mass shootings. But more often than not, a number of extra-clinical, societal factors are far more predictive of gun violence than is mental illness alone. Substance use, male gender, past histories of violence including domestic abuse, social networks and the availability of firearms all correlate with nonsuicide gun violence more strongly than does psychiatric diagnosis; and of course, these factors can affect all populations, not just psychiatric ones. Gun violence is often a problem of us rather than a problem of them, and should be addressed as such.
In the broader sense, asking us to diagnose mass shooters in isolation feels impossible without addressing the larger contexts that surround the rise in mass shootings in the United States, like the dramatic increase in civilian owned assault rifles and other weapons of mass casualty. Many current analyses link this expansion to trends in mass shootings. As the New York Times recently put it, “the only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.” Yet this expansion of guns in everyday life has gone hand in hand with a narrowing of the rhetoric through which U.S. culture talks about the role of guns and shootings. Insanity in the aftermath of mass shootings then becomes the only politically safe place to discuss charged issues such as gun violence prevention or strategies for public safety.
For these and other reasons, psychiatrists like me often cringe when we hear statements like Trump’s, and hem and haw when asked by journalists whether particular mental illnesses lead to specific mass shootings. It’s not that we don’t think that a person’s psychological history is important to understanding their actions—quite the opposite. Rather, it’s often our sense that reducing gun crime solely to a “mental health problem at the highest level,” as the president did with the Texas shooting, dangerously oversimplifies the questions we ought to be asking about mass shootings.
As such, I believe there are more meaningful ways for psychiatrists to help in the effort against gun violence and mass shootings: by also addressing shifting American beliefs and attitudes around guns, and about our increasingly polarized reactions to mass shootings. As but one example, in 1999, far more gun owners cited hunting, rather than self-protection, as the main reason they owned guns. By 2013, those attitudes had shifted: 48 percent said protection was the main reason to own a gun, while 32 percent pointed to hunting. The question of why Americans feel so unsafe around, and mistrustful of each other seems like a pressing one for mental health experts. Mental health expertise might also help us step back from the highly polarized conversations that emerge after mass shootings, and allow people of differing ideologies to find common ground.
Despite the mental health-gun violence dichotomy offered to us by politicians looking for easier answers, the Texas shooting was both a “guns situation” and a “mental health problem.” A problem brought about by the actions of an immensely troubled individual, and a reflection of increasingly lethal realities of everyday life in America. Psychiatrists are eager to help reduce gun violence. But when politicians ask us to predict the impossible, or reduce complex social phenomena into “mental health” issues, it’s often just an excuse for their own failure to address the problem.
Jonathan M. Metzl is a professor of sociology and psychiatry, and director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University. With Ken MacLeish he is author of “Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms.”
Trump Signs Bill Revoking Obama-Era Gun Checks for People With Mental Illnesses
FEB 28 2017, 8:39 PM ET
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President Donald Trump quietly signed a bill into law Tuesday rolling back an Obama-era regulation that made it harder for people with mental illnesses to purchase a gun.
The rule, which was finalized in December, added people receiving Social Security checks for mental illnesses and people deemed unfit to handle their own financial affairs to the national background check database.
Had the rule fully taken effect, the Obama administration predicted it would have added about 75,000 names to that database.
President Barack Obama recommended the now-nullified regulation in a 2013 memo following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which left 20 first graders and six others dead. The measure sought to block some people with severe mental health problems from buying guns.
The original rule was hotly contested by gun rights advocates who said it infringed on Americans’ Second Amendment rights. Gun control advocates, however, praised the rule for curbing the availability of firearms to those who may not use them with the right intentions.
Both the House and Senate last week passed the new bill, H.J. Res 40, revoking the Obama-era regulation.
Trump signed the bill into law without a photo op or fanfare. The president welcomed cameras into the oval office Tuesday for the signing of other executive orders and bills. News that the president signed the bill was tucked at the bottom of a White House email alerting press to other legislation signed by the president.
The National Rifle Association “applauded” Trump’s action. Chris Cox, NRA-ILA executive director, said the move “marks a new era for law-abiding gun owners, as we now have a president who respects and supports our arms.”
Everytown For Gun Safety President John Feinblatt said he expected more gun control rollbacks from the Trump administration. In a statement to NBC News, he called the action "just the first item on the gun lobby’s wish list" and accused the National Rifle Association of "pushing more guns, for more people, in more places."
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a leading gun control advocate in Congress, called out Republicans over the move.
"Republicans always say we don’t need new gun laws, we just need to enforce the laws already on the books. But the bill signed into law today undermines enforcement of existing laws that Congress passed to make sure the background check system had complete information," he said in an emailed statement.
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