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Trump focus on mental health after school shooting denounced
AP ^ | Feb 19 2018 | Lindsey Tanner

Posted on 02/20/2018 3:54:52 AM PST by smileyface

Frustration is mounting in the medical community as the Trump administration again points to mental illness in response to yet another mass shooting.

"The concept that mental illness is a precursor to violent behavior is nonsense," said Dr. Louis Kraus, forensic psychiatry chief at Chicago's Rush University Medical College. "The vast majority of gun violence is not attributable to mental illness."

Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old charged with killing 17 people on Valentine's Day at his former high school in Parkland, Florida has been described by students as a loner with troubling behavior who had been kicked out of school. His mother recently died and Cruz had been staying with family friends.

Since the shooting, his mental health has been the focus of President Donald Trump's comments. And on a Thursday call with reporters, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said the administration is committed to addressing serious mental illness and that his agency "will be laser-focused on this issue in the days, weeks, and months to come."

Mental health professionals welcome more resources and attention, but they say the administration is ignoring the real problem — easy access to guns, particularly the kind of high-powered highly lethal assault weapons used in many of the most recent mass shootings.

"Even for those who manage to survive gun violence involving these weapons, the severity and lasting impact of their wounds, disabilities and treatment leads to devastating consequences," American Medical Association President David Barbe wrote in an online column after the shooting.

"We are not talking about Second Amendment rights or restricting your ability to own a firearm. We are talking about a public health crisis that our Congress has failed to address. This must end," Barbe wrote.

(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: florida; school; shooting
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To: grania
What should be looked into is the pharmaceuticals that have messed up the minds of many who were prescribed them. Also look into which pols receive donations from those who push these poisons

You're wrong.

The drugs help a lot of people. They "free the will", and most of the time, for most people who take them, their "will" is to not suffer and to live as close to a normal life as they can.

The problem is that some people's craziness is a device, a defense mechanism if you will, to block or to obstruct their underlying evil, and when you free THEIR will with drugs you create a killer.

The psychiatric profession has abandoned its responsibility to protect society under the guise of "protecting their patients" from evil, judgmental normies like us, and this has to end.

21 posted on 02/20/2018 4:27:37 AM PST by Jim Noble (Single payer is coming. Which kind do you like?)
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To: smileyface
Certainly not all mentally ill people are violent but some most assuredly are! And given that we,acceding to the demands of Marxist "therapists",shut down most of our psychiatric hospitals in the 70's and 80's we now have no place to put the violent ones.

In an earlier day this pig would have been in a locked psychiatric ward long before he did his dastardly deed.

22 posted on 02/20/2018 4:47:20 AM PST by Gay State Conservative (Obama & Hillary: The Two Most Corrupt Politicians of My Lifetime.)
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To: Jim Noble

the AP writer, Lindsey Tanner, is being taken to task by a number of people on Twitter too:

Twitter: APHealthScience: “The concept that mental illness is a precursor to violent behavior is nonsense.” Doctor groups react in aftermath of Florida shooting. By @LindseyTanner
https://twitter.com/APHealthScience/status/965642038162096130

remember this one. look at who was tweeting:

15 Feb: Reason: No, Trump Did Not Make It Easier for Mentally Ill People to Buy Guns
Shooting revives deliberately misleading talking points about a bad regulation both the NRA and the ACLU opposed.
by Scott Shackford, associate editor at Reason
In response, a Twitter and media parade of people spouted misleading claims about an Obama-era regulation that Trump and Congress rolled back

TWEET: Chris Cuomo: are you aware that one of the regulations you got rid of made it more difficult for mentally ill to get guns?

TWEET: ABC News: .@CeciliaVega: “One of the only major actions that Pres. Trump has taken on gun control is to block an Obama-era rule that made it harder for the mentally ill to have access to guns.”

TWEET: Jennifer Rubin: almost a year ago Trump signed a bill rolling back Obama measure making it harder for mentally ill to get guns

TWEET: Daily Beast: A year ago today, the Senate rolled back an Obama regulation that would have prevented 75,000 severely mentally ill people from buying guns and put them “in the hands of people too mentally unstable to manage their own bank accounts” wrote @cliffschecter http://thebea.st/2EsKm9w

None of this is a remotely accurate description of what happened...
It’s shameful to ignore the serious constitutional problems of this poorly conceived rule just to sow panic and implicate one’s political opponents
https://reason.com/blog/2018/02/15/no-trump-did-not-make-it-easier-for-ment

of course, Snopes pushed the lie:

Snopes: Did President Trump Revoke Gun Background Checks for Mentally Ill People?
In February 2017, President Trump repealed an Obama-era regulation that would have made it easier to block the sale of firearms to people with certain mental illnesses.
MOSTLY TRUE

as did the other usual suspects:

15 Feb: Mother Jones: Trump, Who Made It Easier for Mentally Ill People to Buy Guns, Blames Mental Health Issues for Florida Shooting
by Inae Oh

PLUS, OF COURSE, THE LIE BEGAN A YEAR AGO:

15 Feb 2017: AP: Congress blocks rule barring mentally impaired from guns

28 Feb 2017: NBC: Trump Signs Bill Revoking Obama-Era Gun Checks for People With Mental Illnesses
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 National Rifle Association “applauded” Trump’s action...


23 posted on 02/20/2018 4:48:51 AM PST by MAGAthon
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To: Jim Noble
You say the drugs help a lot of people. For those people they might help (I don't see that making people dependent on chemicals is helping), why not get to the underlying causes? Lack of community involvement, a violent culture, no values education, disassociation from reality, etc.

And what about those who are turned into homicidal maniacs by these poisons? Even if it's a minority, it's a minority we can not tolerate. They're massacring people.

I'd love to see a few lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies and medical professionals who pushed these poisons on their victims.

24 posted on 02/20/2018 4:49:20 AM PST by grania (Deplorable and Proud of It!)
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To: smileyface

A former co-worker of mine is now serving a 60 year sentence for murdering his room mate. Why did he kill her? Because the voices in his head told him to. He was diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia 8 years before he started working for us. He was very disruptive in the office and made many people uncomfortable. He made threats to co-workers and talked about violence. He was with my company only for 5 months but his behavior was the same in all the other companies he worked for until the murder.

How did he kill his room mate? He first strangled her and when she became unconscious, he butchered her with a knife. (It was so violent, he broke the knife in 3 different pieces) When the mentally ill kill or assault, it is typically with everyday items: knives, blunt force objects, hand guns, their bare hands, etc. They can use guns as weapons but its not that is not the common method.

Cruz could have brought a knapsack to school filled with explosives and detonated it in the crowded cafeteria killing 17. Or Cruz could have taken his car and used to to run down fellow students on the school’s sidewalks when they were leaving school, killing 17. These common methods are used by both terrorists and the mentally ill nowadays to kill. It would be easy for Cruz to do either one especially the car since it would have taken little to no planning and create no suspicion.

The bottom line is that if the mentally ill are determined to kill, they will and will use any means around them to do so. To single out one weapon that is rarely used and act as if that will make all the difference to stop the killing is ridiculous. In my research, it is estimated that 3-4 people are murdered by someone with a severe mental illness everyday in this country. These are typically individual murders and the weapons used are usually knives, bare hands, handguns, hammers, etc. You never hear about these crimes since they are only involving one person.

Those with severe mental disorders can become violent and deadly. They need to be watched constantly and once they are deemed a threat to themselves or others, need to be institutionalized. Somehow making it hard for the mentally ill to access just one weapon is not going to have any significant impact on the problem.


25 posted on 02/20/2018 4:50:05 AM PST by TMA62 (Al Sharpton - The North Korea of race relations)
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To: grania
why not get to the underlying causes? Lack of community involvement, a violent culture, no values education, disassociation from reality, etc.

Sure.

Why not?

Write to your Congressman.

26 posted on 02/20/2018 4:51:45 AM PST by Jim Noble (Single payer is coming. Which kind do you like?)
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To: TMA62
once they are deemed a threat to themselves or others, need to be institutionalized

The institutions are gone.

27 posted on 02/20/2018 4:54:21 AM PST by Jim Noble (Single payer is coming. Which kind do you like?)
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To: Gay State Conservative

Most mentally ill are canaries in the culture. Their emotional boundaries are more permeable than the average person and they take in more and more of the culture and react to it as they are told to do by the media.

I call them the Cultural Canaries.

The leftist media has been advocating violence for a long time through video and presentation.

As for medications being the cause of the violence, well, of course most of the people who commit mass murder have been or are on or just came off of psychiatric drugs.

For most of them have been unstable for a long period of time and have been treated, for their mental instability. Mental illness and the kind of instability that causes mass murders of this nature just doesn’t pop up. These are people who have been mentally deteriorating for a long time. And they have been treated with the appropriate medications to manage their symptoms.

Whether they complied with follow up treatment, or took their medications, or not, is about judgment, which is something most mentally ill people do not have. As a matter of fact, lack of judgment is a symptom in most mental illnesses.

So to start talking about how these people were on different antidepressants, benzos, mood stabilizers, and antipsychotics and point fingers at the medications, is ridiculous.

It is the mental illness, not the medication or the gun that is at issue.

You would be better served to criticize a broken mental health system which is so hampered by HIPPA and Patient Rights that it is unable to prevent all but the most IMMEDIATE dangerous patients (and they have to prove it to the courts) from leaving the building.

You are all right, we did not have this sort of thing years ago and a good portion of what is going on is thus: people do what they are told, think what they are told, and the mentally ill have less filters from the common culture than others. They reflect the culture.

Therefore the violence our culture censored years ago, that many people either avoid or can filter, goes straight to the minds of the mentally ill and influences them greatly.

Censorship in the past was not there to keep you in the dark but instead was in place to protect the weak, including the weak-minded....and thus...the society as a whole.

We have eliminated hospital beds from our healthcare system in general and have closed down long term facilities for the mentally ill and developmentally retarded. We have shut down facilities that used to school and board troubled and mentally ill children and adolescents, and have opened programs that handle much less, and that require a much higher bar to enter, than before.

We have given adolescents patient rights, and have moved parents and guardians to the sidelines in decision-making for their care. I have seen frustrated and end of rope patents kill their mentally ill children and then suicide because the options of homes and locked facilities are not longer present.

No this is not an issue of pharma or guns, this is an issue of what we have become as a culture.

We had individuals in the old system who were abused in the large institutions. I submit that between homelessness, lack of treatment, people who predate on the mentally ill and retarded, and the damages and injuries caused by the mentally ill and mentally retarded, there is far more abuse and crime today that there ever was in post-war institutions in the US.

The large institutions of old, were places developed in compassion. In older times, families locked their mentally ill in attics, or starved and killed them. Towns fathers would quietly capture and kill dangerous mentally ill. We chose to give them a home and three hots and a cot. That is gone. We refuse to take care of these people and we are letting them die, and we are letting them kill. I suspect the larger issue is to control the culture, and remove guns.

Don’t blame pharma, blame your local leftist lawyer and politician for eliminating effective mental health care.


28 posted on 02/20/2018 4:57:19 AM PST by Chickensoup (Leftists today are speaking as if they plan to commence to commit genocide against conservatives.)
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To: Gay State Conservative

Most mentally ill are canaries in the culture. Their emotional boundaries are more permeable than the average person and they take in more and more of the culture and react to it as they are told to do by the media.

I call them the Cultural Canaries.

The leftist media has been advocating violence for a long time through video and presentation.

As for medications being the cause of the violence, well, of course most of the people who commit mass murder have been or are on or just came off of psychiatric drugs.

For most of them have been unstable for a long period of time and have been treated, for their mental instability. Mental illness and the kind of instability that causes mass murders of this nature just doesn’t pop up. These are people who have been mentally deteriorating for a long time. And they have been treated with the appropriate medications to manage their symptoms.

Whether they complied with follow up treatment, or took their medications, or not, is about judgment, which is something most mentally ill people do not have. As a matter of fact, lack of judgment is a symptom in most mental illnesses.

So to start talking about how these people were on different antidepressants, benzos, mood stabilizers, and antipsychotics and point fingers at the medications, is ridiculous.

It is the mental illness, not the medication or the gun that is at issue.

You would be better served to criticize a broken mental health system which is so hampered by HIPPA and Patient Rights that it is unable to prevent all but the most IMMEDIATE dangerous patients (and they have to prove it to the courts) from leaving the building.

You are all right, we did not have this sort of thing years ago and a good portion of what is going on is thus: people do what they are told, think what they are told, and the mentally ill have less filters from the common culture than others. They reflect the culture.

Therefore the violence our culture censored years ago, that many people either avoid or can filter, goes straight to the minds of the mentally ill and influences them greatly.

Censorship in the past was not there to keep you in the dark but instead was in place to protect the weak, including the weak-minded....and thus...the society as a whole.

We have eliminated hospital beds from our healthcare system in general and have closed down long term facilities for the mentally ill and developmentally retarded. We have shut down facilities that used to school and board troubled and mentally ill children and adolescents, and have opened programs that handle much less, and that require a much higher bar to enter, than before.

We have given adolescents patient rights, and have moved parents and guardians to the sidelines in decision-making for their care. I have seen frustrated and end of rope patents kill their mentally ill children and then suicide because the options of homes and locked facilities are not longer present.

No this is not an issue of pharma or guns, this is an issue of what we have become as a culture.

We had individuals in the old system who were abused in the large institutions. I submit that between homelessness, lack of treatment, people who predate on the mentally ill and retarded, and the damages and injuries caused by the mentally ill and mentally retarded, there is far more abuse and crime today that there ever was in post-war institutions in the US.

The large institutions of old, were places developed in compassion. In older times, families locked their mentally ill in attics, or starved and killed them. Towns fathers would quietly capture and kill dangerous mentally ill. We chose to give them a home and three hots and a cot. That is gone. We refuse to take care of these people and we are letting them die, and we are letting them kill. I suspect the larger issue is to control the culture, and remove guns.

Don’t blame pharma, blame your local leftist lawyer and politician for eliminating effective mental health care.


29 posted on 02/20/2018 4:57:19 AM PST by Chickensoup (Leftists today are speaking as if they plan to commence to commit genocide against conservatives.)
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To: Jim Noble

I write to and call my congressmen and Senators quite often. As usual, they’re on vacation this week.


30 posted on 02/20/2018 5:04:08 AM PST by grania (Deplorable and Proud of It!)
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To: JLAGRAYFOX

“However, no prayers for your “Criminal” Democrat Congresswoman, Debbie Wassermann Schultz. If you voted for her or support her...you should hang your head in shame. “

And her lapdog, Sheriff Scott Israel. Then there’s the FBI d!ckhead, Lasky, who was the one who gave the lame excuse about how the FBI had f*cked up. Seventeen people are dead, and yet, no one has been shown the door in either law enforcement, the school administration and school board.


31 posted on 02/20/2018 5:33:23 AM PST by vette6387
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To: smileyface

Mental health issues are not where the leftist crazies want to focus—they want to focus on disarming the populace so they can take over. Beware an armed government and an unarmed populace. Remember Tienanmen Square.


32 posted on 02/20/2018 5:43:16 AM PST by yldstrk (My heroes have always been cowboys)
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To: TMA62

And the other reason these loony tunes kill is because their misery is someone else’s fault, never their own.


33 posted on 02/20/2018 5:45:32 AM PST by yldstrk (My heroes have always been cowboys)
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To: smileyface
"The vast majority of gun violence is not attributable to mental illness."

Typical, lying libtard "smoke & mirrors" use of statistics!

Overall (as in punk-infested Chicago) that may well be the case.

BUT, in mass shootings (including school shootings, the subject of this article) mental state is invariably a huge factor!

34 posted on 02/20/2018 5:46:39 AM PST by TXnMA (MSM? No, thanks -- I prefer my news from the other end of the horse...)
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To: smileyface

A school here in Louisiana was forced to shut down because someone called in a threat.

It is the fault of the NRA, for sure.


35 posted on 02/20/2018 5:47:19 AM PST by odawg
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To: Williams
Another "dog bites man" anti-Trump screed from the media.

Getting rather tiresome.

36 posted on 02/20/2018 5:49:01 AM PST by daler
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To: captain_dave

Medical community does not like to called on the carpet for their mistakes.
.....................................................
Agreed. However, it should be noted that the AMA only represents a small portion of the “Medical Community.” My own physician does not belong, nor did my former(retired) doctor.


37 posted on 02/20/2018 6:16:35 AM PST by Mollypitcher1 (I have not yet begun to fight....John Paul Jones)
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To: vette6387

You are right...the real culprits always get away....Wasserman Shultz, Israel, & the low life, FBI deadbeat, Lasky, should all be in jail this moment. Will never happen. Sad to say, our once great Nation Republic is dying and, the American people and voters have nary a clue as to what is coming.

It will either be tyranny, despots, dictators from the Democrat Party or, it will be from the Chinese (PRC), the Russians, the Iranians & the North Koreans. America needs to wake up into the real world.


38 posted on 02/20/2018 6:17:41 AM PST by JLAGRAYFOX (Defeat both the Republican (e) & Democrat (e) political parties....Forever!!!)
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To: Williams

The “medical community” rejects any connection between mass murder by crazy people and their mental illness.
...............................................
77% of Doctors say the AMA does not represent their views.

During the 1950’s 75% of doctors belonged to the AMA. NOW, less than 25% belong.

Only about 17% of the 1.2 MILLION Doctors and Med Students in the US are members of the AMA.

WHO DO THE AMA SPOKESMEN THINK THEY SPEAK FOR?


39 posted on 02/20/2018 6:30:15 AM PST by Mollypitcher1 (I have not yet begun to fight....John Paul Jones)
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To: smileyface

And there is a problem focusing on one important aspect of this shooting?

PC crowd at it again, cannot call something what it actually is.

At one time a decade or so ago, homosexuality was a psychological disorder....not no more cause the PC psychologists changed such.

At one time, transgender was a psychological disorder....not no more cause the PC psychologists changed such.

And now, ‘the’ gun is the problem when we have a mass shooting, not the psychological disposition or the individual, in general. Go figure....


40 posted on 02/20/2018 7:03:39 AM PST by cranked
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