Posted on 12/19/2012 12:46:29 PM PST by Jean S
I wish you could listen to my voice mail and read the emails I receive about stories I've written over the past 30 years on people with severe mental illness.
If you could, I'm sure you would agree: We do an awful job of identifying people who are dangerous and getting help for them.
The massacre last Friday of 27 people in Connecticut, including 20 first-graders, exposes that in the most heartbreaking way. It's one of our nation's greatest shames.
You can hear the panic in the voices of the people who call me to say they are trying to stay safe in a world that doesn't seem to care about them.
Most people I know who have mental illness are funny and smart and kind. They are perfectly able to live independently. Their illnesses ebb and flow. They have rich, fulfilling relationships.
I'm not talking about those people.
I'm talking about the ones who think people are coming through the heating vents to kill them - so they have to kill first. I'm talking about the man who imagines the woman walking by him in the park is the devil - so he stabbed her to death. Hypothetical? No. That happened in Milwaukee.
If you've ever watched people with those kinds of delusions shake and cower, you know how terrifying that can be - for them and for you.
If you could sit with me in these interviews, you could see the anguish in Gloria Keen's eyes as she describes how she tried to get help for her daughter, Brenda Thiel. Brenda was hearing menacing voices telling her to kill her child.
It was Gloria who found her 2-year-old grandson, Caleb, dead in his bed.
(Excerpt) Read more at jsonline.com ...
Yes, let’s deal with it.
Let us snatch some millions, no, hundreds of millions of dollars off the great money trees and flit them off to pastoral farms, fill their veins with lithium, and set them quietly on benches in sweat suits under the shade of old oak trees. It’s all so pretty.
You are obviously ignorant of the fact that letting the mentally ill roam the streets has cost way more than hospitalization ever cost. I saw a study once (when this subject came up after some other mass murder a few years ago) of the increased costs of emergency room care, sanitation and police, plus the lost wages, medical and funeral expenses of the victims and their families - and believe me, in-patient treatment was a heck of a lot cheaper.
Many if not most of the “homeless” are mentally ill, and if you live in any city, you can see how they have destroyed all public spaces and street life in many areas.
As for lithium, that’s way in the past, and having visited people who were hospitalized in the New York State system until deinstitutionalization hit in the late 1960s, yes, these places were quite nice and, in addition to often providing the only jobs in their remote Upstate towns, gave the residents a decent, dignified place to live. There were recreational programs, they lived in cottages with 24 hour care, and their medication was supervised. Some of them could stabilize enough to go into other programs, but most of them were going to be there for the rest of their lives, and it was certainly a lot better for both them and us than having them raving in a doorway somewhere and pushing people under the subway.
Yes, let’s deal with it.
Let us snatch some millions, no, hundreds of millions of dollars off the great money trees and flit them off to pastoral farms, fill their veins with lithium, and set them quietly on benches in sweat suits under the shade of old oak trees. It’s all so pretty
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Right now we are spending hundreds of millions on not very effective care.
You obviously didn’t read the article but thanks for your input anyway.
If memory serves - 97% percent of American Psychological Association members are self-identify liberals.
If 97% of the members of the American Psychological Association were heterosexual or male - white or all three - there would be massive calls for 'diversity'.
Cries of racism would be heard throughout the organization...
But for some strange reason ( like bias or hatred of an 'other' group) they seem to have missed that about 50% of the population is conservative - but only 3% of their organization.
In short, I don't trust them because they've created a group-think they're unaware of...
Deinstitutionalization opened the doors of all these facilities and allowed the inmates to flood into our cities. More than half of the mass shootings in the last few years were done by people who were known to be howling madmen. All of them should have been safely locked away without access to dangerous weapons, yet they were wandering the streets, free to destroy other people’s lives. Build new secure facilities and lock up the crazies within. I don’t care how much it costs. The alternative is to remove all dangerous objects from everywhere in the country so homicidal maniacs can’t get hold of them. And I for one am not interested in using blunt kindergarten scissors to cut paper.
The psychologists and psychiatrists will never go along with this. They’re too busy changing their manuals to label transsexuals and pedophiles normal and conservative Christians mentally unbalanced.
Problem is that Obama will define Christianity and heterosexuality as mental illnesses and start rounding us up.
Yes, instead of putting away the people who are doing the damage, they’re expecting us to live in fortresses with, as you say, no sharp objects in reach.
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