Add in the “fire and forget” mental health system.
What do I mean? Give them a pill that is not completely understoood and assume all is well. Mental illness requires more treatment than a psychotropic drug. Effective treatment requires monitoring and a stable environment. These things are all equally important. What we have now is a system that is horribly broken. We have mentally ill that abuse other drugs. We have mentally ill who have been on the same drug (same dosage) for so long that their brains have been permanently changed/altered. We have families (often broken families) who are too busy or uneducated to really help.
We don’t have enough resources to effectively treat the mentally ill and we rely too much on medication without knowing if the patient takes it or not. Our families are conditioned to believe treatment does not involve them - it is someone elses responsibility - often government run and funded. We no longer believe in counseling and monitoring and have put too many laws in place for professional mental health workers to discuss concerns with family and law enforcement.
We can’t have an honest conversation about the root of the problem because of the politics of guns. Broken families + broken mental health system + overhyped pharmaceutical solutions = ticking timebombs.
Let’s put into a real prospective. You walk around during a seven day period, and there’s likely six people that you bump into...who have a mental issue of some sort or a drug issue...and they are a potential threat to your life. The only reason you are alive at the end of seven days? Luck.
We rely on luck and meds...to survive each week. If you had laid this out to Americans in 1940...they would have fired political figures quickly and put the guys who are a threat into a state mental hospital. End of the story. My dad recounted how it simply took five folks in the 1930s to sign a petition and a county judge could put you into a state institute. It was a fairly simple task and you didn’t worry about some idiot coming to kill you or your friends.