Focus on helping the mentally ill - Denver Post

[HowardW56]

Focus on helping the mentally ill

Those under the age of 40 may not believe it, but when I was young, this mass murder in Aurora would have been not just horrifying, but also unimaginable.

Not anymore.

Complete Article

[dustoff31]

Not only do we no longer care for the mentally ill, we don't even bother to identify them anymore. If they should happen to come to our attention in some way, we ignore them.

Good article. FWIW, Cramer wrote a very similar article in his column for the current issue of Shotgun News. I'm afraid that many here wouldn't be particulary pleased with what he had to say.

[8886]

I saw the headline and thought it might have something to do with reinstatement of rights...

[jonzer77]

Not only do we no longer care for the mentally ill, we don't even bother to identify them anymore. If they should happen to come to our attention in some way, we ignore them.

Good article. FWIW, Cramer wrote a very similar article in his column for the current issue of Shotgun News. I'm afraid that many here wouldn't be particulary pleased with what he had to say.

Who determines that someone is crazy? There is a reason that we stopped just throwing people in the looney bin without then committing any crimes whatsoever.

[dustoff31]

Who determines that someone is crazy?

The same people who determine that someone is sane.

There is a reason that we stopped just throwing people in the looney bin without then committing any crimes whatsoever.

So a mentally ill person must be locked up? Do they need care only after they commit a crime?

[bubbapug1]

The reason mental health care was cut was due to budget issues, not civil liberty issues.

We throw people in jail who don't commit any crimes on a daily basis, some we even execute. Whats the big deal...mistakes happen.

Maybe one day we will have our own minority report...which is a lot like gun control, only more specific....isn't that what gun confiscation is? A form of prounouncing us guilty of contemplating some crime before we actually do it?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/

[GaryV]

The reason mental health care was cut was due to budget issues, not civil liberty issues.

Partially true. There was a major change in the 1960s in the legalities of committing someone involuntarily to a mental institution. The author was correct that people were often locked away for months or years. But this was generally a bad thing, as the reason for it was not because they needed treatment, but because they had little to no legal recourse to challenge their commitment. And the treatments used often left them permanently debilitated and in much worse shape than when they went in, causing permanent institutionalization. In the 1960s, starting with the Kennedy administration, laws were put into place to protect the rights of patients, which did lead to the deinstitutionalization of a large portion of the population of these facilities.

However, the drop in the number of hospitals, and beds within those hospitals, that has continued unabated since then has been entirely budgetary. Very few people care at all about mental health care, and so politicians know that they can cut funding to it virtually at will and risk no backlash from voters. So it is the first and most frequently cut expenditure whenever they need to pay for some new program or tax cut.

[curtisfong]

This is a unique opportunity to present the issue of public safety vs civil rights.

If we really want to be free of "whacko violent psychopaths", we would need to rebuild the mental institution system, complete with its BLATANT civil rights abuses.

Provide that as a sample solution to your nearest anti-gunner, and make it clear that to be 100% safe, we would have to lock up just about everybody suspected of being insane, and make sure they have no recourse to challenge their incarceration. Sure, we'd also lock up thousands (tens of thousands?) of people who should not be incarcerated, but after all, we would be safe, no?

Oh, and by the way, the odds are vanishingly low that you'd die at the hands of a psycho, so really you'd have no way of knowing whether it is working. And there is always the outlier case of somebody who slipped through the cracks. When that happens, when then? Lock up more people? Hundreds of thousands?

[bubbapug1]

Poverty and no hope contributes to mental illness.

Just one more example of how america is slipping into becoming a third world class society even though income wise our gdp has not declined. Wait until more geniuses and sexually frustrated young men can't find an outlet for their minds and urges....the shooting gallery has just begun to open.

Class warfare has its costs. Its collateral damage, but on our own population.

The chances are slim of getting killed in a mass shooting, but in many cases the signs are there...ditto for 9/11...someone just needs to act on the signs.

And in most cases its a young male doing the shooting.

[Kappy]

If you identify crazy people, you must care for them. We don't have the infrastructure to deal with criminals... this is NOT a door we want to open for financial reasons.

It is a shame our checkbooks make us cowards.