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.
How right you are. Anyone with personal experience dealing with mental health issues has encountered the very real limitations of the “system.” Psychotropic drugs are simply not able to cope with the complex patterns of thought and biochemistry that produce what we call mental illness. It’s like trying to fix a broken piston by putting a supposedly better oil in the engine. It just doesn’t fix the problem, though it may quiet the engine a little. But then what if you find even that “fix” is making the problem worse over time, that there are abrasives in the oil that are damaging parts if the engine that were fine before treatment. Tardive dyskinesia is the sort of thing any reasonable person would want to avoid, to mention just one of many possibilities.
Which is why the problem cannot be solved entirely on a basis of prevention. Some bad actors will always leak through. What we can do, what lies within our power to do, is to meet those bad actors with good ammo. 9mm, double tap, center mass, problem solved.