Schizophrenia is an especially cruel disease. With no warning it strikes often very smart, promising young people and eats away the core of their self. It strikes at exactly the age when young men and women become independent from their parents, making it hard to impossible for family to catch the early warning signs or do anything about it when they do. It broke my heart to see two different young people leave a PhD program when their deteriorating condition, and the medications to control it, made it impossible to continue their studies.
Jared Loughner is 24 now. The schizophrenic who shot up a psychiatric hospital in Pittsburgh was 30, but by his mid twenties he was already dangerous, paranoid and struggling to maintain a regular job. We still know almost nothing about James Holmes, the man who committed these shootings, but this nugget from ABC suggests that we should take a deep breath before we assume any coherent political motives on the shooter’s part.
A San Diego woman who identified herself as James Holmes’ mother told ABC News she had awoken unaware of the shooting and had not yet been contacted by authorities. She immediately expressed concern that her son may have been involved.
“You have the right person,” she said, apparently speaking on gut instinct. “I need to call the police… I need to fly out to Colorado.”
Best not to assume anything yet. Take some time away from the blog, hug someone you care about and pray for the victims if praying is your thing.
***Update***
BTW, about the ABC tea party rumor – there is a Jim Holmes from near Aurora who likes fringey gun conspiracy sites, but he is the wrong age. Much as I loathe the tea party, and it hardly seems outside the realm of possibility, reporters need to take more care about creating false impressions that can be difficult to correct later. Avoid making the same mistake that CNN did with the ACA decision.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Unpossible.
NCSteve
And if you need to get mad at someone, get mad at state and local governments who consider mental health a piggy bank that can be raided free of political risk, and no matter how little is left after the last raid, every time budgets get tight. And consider making that an issue that’s important to you when you vote and letting them know you do.
Villago Delenda Est
No assumptions here.
Other than it’s too fucking easy to get your hands on firearms in this country to do this sort of thing.
Hoodie
pseudonymous in nc
@NCSteve:
And FYIGM voters who won’t pay for public provision for the severely mentally ill, then wonder where the authorities were when people get hurt.
hep kitty
But yet, in America, the mentally ill are all but ignored until they shoot up some people and then it’s too late. We have already cut back on social programs that help them get what little help there is out there for them. But we want to gouge them even more.
And then we are shocked, SHOCKED, when something like this happens. Is it okay for me to say that I don’t understand America?
eggnog
Cruelty to “schizophrenics” fits a pattern of violence in this country that ranges from the murderous, mercifully departed Bush regime straight to the Pittsburgh incident. Spreading its poisonous tendrils along the way.
Its sales pitch is seductive: “i wanna be your sledge hammer.”
The Moar You Know
Loughner had “coherent political motives”. He is being granted a mulligan by society because he also suffers from an awful disease, but his choice of targets was not random and I wish people would stop excusing/overlooking that.
As to this shooting, I’ll simply point out that to be able to shoot 60 plus people and kill 12 of them in a dark theater requires a pretty masterful command of a firearm and a lot of determination.
4tehluz
>Best not to assume anything yet.
Since Mitt is still campaigning today while the Obamas and Biden have cancelled their events, can I assume that Mitt is a self-centered fuck with no soul?
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@pseudonymous in nc: @NCSteve:
And we wonder why, nationally, there are 3x as many people with diagnosable/diagnosed mental illness incarcerated as are hospitalized. That’s from a National Sheriff’s Assn study, the citation for which I don’t have readily at hand.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@hep kitty: Just think of this as a free market solution to the problem of midnight showings. And if it doesn’t make sense, then you’re not thinking about it hard enough.
JoyfulA
My old boss’s sister-in-law went through that in her early 20s. Wealthy family, smart kid with a good education and a good job, just passed her CPA exam, and she suddenly unraveled. Getting her committed for observation against her will was excruciatingly difficult, even though she’d made several attempts at self-destruction.
Please, somebody cure whatever causes this unraveling.
lgerard
John Salvi was another example of this, isolated from his family, then inflamed by religious fanatics, he finally just snapped.
Villago Delenda Est
@JoyfulA:
Sorry, can’t. Beancounters at Bain Capital can’t see any immediate bottom line benefit to it.
Punchy
And here I just thought it took a fully automatic machine gun, one finger, and no soul.
Charles
But at least the FBI can assure us no “terrorism” was involved! Nope, no terrorism here. John Holmes is a white dude, and by definition not a terrorist.
Villago Delenda Est
The need to be first, for ratings purposes, with some bit of “breaking news” overrides any journalistic common sense in the MSM. They need to get product out there NOW to attract eyeballs NOW. If the information happens to be accurate, well, that’s tertiary to the needs of corporate for a ratings victory.
CREAM is destroying this fucking country. It has to stop.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Charles: That is what pisses me off. The narrow definition of “terrorist”. His intention was clearly to “terrorize” people. He achieved that objective. He is by definition “a terrorist”. I don’t give a shit what the FBI says.
magurakurin
@Villago Delenda Est:
ding ding ding. That’s a winner, but it’ll never go anywhere. Just another round of head scratching trying to figure out why it happened.
It happened because someone sold a crazy person a shitload of guns. But all the focus will be on mental health (not a bad thing in itself, mental health care needs a big upgrade) and no serious person will suggest the obvious….stop selling the goddamn guns.
Chance of being slaughter in a random shooting is the price of living or visiting the United States.
Villago Delenda Est
@Punchy:
Just that.
Most modern military grade small arms are about making the other guy duck, not about actually hitting them.
If you fire a semiauto into a crowd, you’re likely to hit someone without an aim. Just spraying lead in the general direction of the panic (remember that this guy popped a teargas cannister to help mess things up) and you’re going to get some hits. This guy was not a sniper. He was spraying rounds into a crowd. Of people climbing over theater seats, and each other.
Professor
Can’t this shooting be labeled as a matter of ‘stay your ground’ incident? FOX News Channel will get an exclusive interview very soon!
Linda Featheringill
Kind thoughts go out to the folks in and around Aurora. To those who agree with me and those who disagree: I hope your loved ones made it home safely.
And to those who are suffering from loss this morning: My deepest sympathies.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Litlebritdifrnt: I happen to consider what Rush Limbaugh does to be terrorism: Scaring people in order to change the way they behave and think. What we don’t know yet about this guy is whether or not he was doing it to scare people.
While this might be hair splitting in some sense, random shootings aren’t necessarily terrorists acts.
hep kitty
@4tehluz: Bet you $10,000 that he’s going to take that opportunity to blame Obama.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@The Moar You Know:
Totally this.
We’re talking apples & oranges here.
redshirt
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Along these lines, the entirety of the Republican Party could be classified as a terrorist organization. Is not their intent to terrorize? Both supporters and opponents alike?
JoyfulA
@Villago Delenda Est: Hmm, I own maybe three shares of some big pharma company. I’ll demand, as a stockholder, a progress report ASAP. I’ll get a letter back, like the ones I get from my senators.
Well, at least I can make my annual contribution to NAMI Pennsylvania to help make up for what Gov. Corbett cut from the mental health budget.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
Whenever someone who is mentally ill murders people with a firearm I find myself asking why and how they managed to get access to a firearm in the first place.
While it’s true that sometimes it’s not possible to tell someone is schizophrenic until they reach that point of deteriorating, consider this:
In Issac Zamora’s case, his mother knew he was mentally ill from a much earlier age. Furthermore, he had been locked up and identified as mentally ill by correction officials something like a week prior to his murder spree.
In Kyle Huff’s case, he had already been locked up for discharging firearms indoors previously. He used the same gun he had committed that crime with to later murder several people in Seattle.
Ever since Reagan the solution to treating the mentally ill seems to be, let them go – close the hospitals, cut the funding – and give them a gun.
/shakes head.
hep kitty
See, all these onerous gun-control measures Obama has implemented is scaring the people into thinking they might not get to kill enough people before they die.
Charles
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): “…random shootings aren’t necessarily terrorists acts”
Unless the shooter is one of those people, in which case we wouldn’t want to rule out the possibility of some connection to terrorism.
Villago Delenda Est
@JoyfulA:
Yeah, I know. This crap frustrates the hell out of me, too.
The cost to human life just doesn’t show up on a balance sheet, and for the past 30 years, that’s the only thing that matters.
RoonieRoo
Thank you Tim. My late husband died from this awful disease. Fortunately for all, he had a moment of clarity that resulted in only his death and saved my life. My anger will never be at him but at the fact that a diagnosed and frequently hospitalized schizophrenic had NO difficulties buying a gun.
Thank you for being a voice of reason. I suspect I need to take a vacation from the comments section coming up.
Violet
Schizophrenia struck one of my most longtime friends when we were all barely adults and still in college. Eventually it killed her. It was tragic for everyone–her family especially as she descended more deeply into the disease, her friends who tried to support her but peeled off one by one as her paranoia became too much to handle, and eventually the people whose lives she affected directly when she died. I’ll leave off the details of how it happened, but it was shocking and horrible and not just for those who loved her.
She was a sweet and kind person, a loving and trusting soul. Little by little that vanished. It was so hard to watch and impossible to help. I still miss her every day.
hep kitty
@danah gaz (fka gaz): Kinda ironic when you consider he was almost killed by a crazy gunman.
flukebucket
Thank you for the post Tim. Perspective is something that is so easily lost.
Litlebritdifrnt
Just now
Terry
What if every progressive, anywhere, started saying, “Guns don’t kill people, people do.”
Then we stop talking about guns, directing the narrative to focus on the lack of adequate mental health care.
Then we get legislation introduced to add more mental health to Obamacare?
4tehluz
Per TPM, Mittens has canceled his campaign for today.
NCSteve
Speaking of demented Tea Party asswipes, of all the people in America who should have been stuffed into a dark closet with their fucking pieholes duck taped shut for the next 48 hours, Louie fucking Gohmert is at the top of the list.
thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/07/20/554761/tea-party-congressman-links-colorado-shooting-to-attack…
Yeah, Louie, this just the time to score some political points, this was obviously all about the evil liberal assault on Christianity and absolutely what was really fucking needed was for there to be a bunch swaggering assholes packing heat in that jammed theater so we could put everyone else there into the crossfire of a goddamned two or three or ten-sided firefight! That would have worked out just great, you unspeakably vile festering pile of all-corrupting hate and ignorance.
Dear Jeebus, hear my prayer. I have just strength enough of my own to live in a world where the mentally ill have easy access to automatic weaponry, but you’re going to have to help me out if I’m also going to have to live in one where pusbuckets like Gohmert hold national office.
cmorenc
@The Moar You Know:
The fact that the perp had a background whereby he was able to accumulate skills that amplify his potential for lethal dangerousness does not negate that his thoughts, emotions, and motivations were heavily driven by mental illness. Paranoid schizophrenics don’t necessarily lose all ability to focus; in fact their delusional thinking can drive an obsessive, determined focus to deal with their demons through pathological actions.
Recognizing that the shooter was very likely driven to commit these acts by a severe mental illness does not mean that he shouldn’t be indefinitely sequestered for the protection of society. It’s simply that we should recognize that there’s a difference between someone who’s simply an evil sadistic psychopath (for example Dr. Joseph Mengele, the evil Nazi doctor who conducted sadistic experiments on Jews in concentration camps) and someone whose rage is driven by the delusional demons of an organic brain disease like schizophrenia.
Roger Moore
@4tehluz:
There’s too much documentation of that to consider it an assumption. More like a well established fact.
ding dong
I am an immigrant. In the mid nineties my uncle from the UK came to visit the family. It was his first and only time he has been to the US. Back then I was still in my foam finger USA USA #1 stage. What I still remember my uncle saying was how this country was such a dog eat dog country. He was shocked we didn’t have national healthcare and regular paid vacations. To keep things in context he grew up dirt poor and pretty much pulled himself up by his bootstraps. And he was here only two weeks to get to that conclusion.
Tim F.
@cmorenc: Correct. Deeply disturbed schizophrenics can become obsessive about a subject and end up quite expert, while incorporating that knowledge into their paranoid fantasies. Paranoids can amass a surprising arsenal and quite a bit of skill in using it. In fact, left to their own devices they often gravitate to it.
magurakurin
Everything everyone is saying about mental illness is totally true. And it is an illness that spreads across national borders and cultures.
But…in Japan when a mentally ill person snaps, they maybe kill two people with a knife, because they simply cannot get a gun. Nobody can.
The US is wrong with its lack of gun control. But it will never change.
So the suggestion above to push for more money for mental health care is actually a really good idea. Best hope, I’d reckon.
Culture of Truth
For the media it’s binary. It’s either Terrorism/ NotTerrorism. But is it so simple?
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@4tehluz:
Both Obama and Romney are saying they will pulls ads from the CO market for the time being.
LanceThruster
In these trying times, I’d certainly favor some socialized mental health care…for everyone.
So sorry for everyone caught up in this horrible tragedy.
pseudonymous in nc
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Because that’s where they get diagnosed and treated. As I’ve said before, prison is the social welfare and treatment system that Americans are happy to vote for. Of course, that doesn’t stop “enterprising” states from contracting out prison healthcare, including mental health, to a bunch of profiteering shysters who pocket the money and skimp on care, allowing those states to save on such extravagances as employee health benefits and retirement.
Litlebritdifrnt
Seebach
Apparently Breitbart.com did the due diligence and found that the shooter was a Democrat. Not linking, just wanted you to know that your world is a terrible one.
pseudonymous in nc
@NCSteve:
He should really stick to witch-hunts against brown people who work for Hillary. Actually, no: he should just lock himself in a closet with Bachmann, Westmoreland and the other members of the Dumb Bigot Caucus, and never come out.
Villago Delenda Est
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Well, isn’t that special?
Gosh, a guy who is fully into the survivalist/paranoia mode. This fits in with the mental illness angle.
Schizophrenic with easy access to explosives, and has either trained himself or received training in same with intent to maim or kill others.
Wonderful. What a country this is!
NCSteve
@The Moar You Know: The theater was jam packed at the premier of the movie event of the year and he was, depending on how the place was built, and he was either at the top or the bottom of a sloping room that had no cover capable of stopping a bullet. All he had to do was point and spray.
Culture of Truth
stuffed into a dark closet with their fucking pieholes duck taped shut for the next 48 hours
Note to self: avoid S&M room at the GOP convention.
cmorenc
@Tim F.: BTW: Many years ago, I worked for a couple of years as patient special counsel in one of our state’s four mental hospitals (representing them in commitment hearings), including some forensic cases. I got to know hundreds of schizophrenics and manic-depressives in the course of my work, some of whom had frankly hilariously amusing manifestations of their illness, some of whom had tragically sad manifestations, some of whom were downright frightening in their manifestations.
Litlebritdifrnt
Could explain where he got the chemicals for making the “explosives”
InternetDragons
In response to some of the comments about insufficient mental health care — what really gets to me is that it’s not solely the care for the severely and persistently mentally ill that has gotten cut, but the first services to go have typically been the ones that would help to identify and intervene with mental health problems BEFORE they fucking get to the ‘severe and persistent’ stage.
An impoverished client in an agency I once worked in cut his own throat in a public park and was of course sent to the E.R. He told me later he wasn’t genuinely trying to kill himself. He was so desperate to get some help with his mental disorder that he rightly assumed he needed to do something drastic to get into a medical facility. The thing is that given all of the restrictions around real access to care…he wasn’t crazy about that. He was right.
OK. I can feel myself slipping into rant mode over all of this. Gonna take a walk. Much love to all here at BJ.
shoutingattherain
The issue has been settled and common sense lost. The majority of people feel this kind of Second Amendment collateral damage is an acceptable alternative to removing the right to own a gun.
Protecting those rights means there’s an increased chance of being killed in a random shooting. This is a price we pay for living in the States in the 21st century. And there’s nothing we can do to change it.
Emily
@Villago Delenda Est:
The bean counters are wrong on this one. If you invent a cure for schizophrenia you could make a great big pile of money.
Litlebritdifrnt
ABC News “Tea Party connection incorrect”
politico.com/blogs/media/2012/07/abc-news-tea-party-connection-incorrect-129588.html
Roger Moore
@Emily:
But not nearly as big a pile as the one you get if you create a pill that schizophrenics will have to take every day for the rest of their lives to keep their mental illness under control. That’s the basic dynamic that’s behind the industry: prolonging illness is much more profitable than curing it quickly.
El Cid
__
Anyone doing so would just be thinking in the silliest manner. There’s no significant evidence of anything whatsoever.
For all we know dude thought he was Bane.
Culture of Truth
Perhaps I being premature here, but if a enrolled medical school student’s signs of mental illness are not recogized and treated, what does that suggest for other folks?
Brachiator
@Tim F:
Yeah, as someone above noted, best not to assume anything at all. On the commute in, one of the talk radio hosts was so hot, so desperate to fill in the gaps with useless speculation (not about motives, but trying to describe the crime scene, asking the news guy if there were video of the cops marking the crime scene, asking how many bodies were still left in the theater, etc), that I just had to turn the damn radio off. No point in switching stations since it was clear that there was as of yet very little coherent or accurate information about this tragedy.
It’s damn weird how many people expect to know everything instantaneously and are willing to make shit up and fill in the gaps with pseudo news.
And we don’t know anything about the suspect or his mental condition, so there is no real point in even tentatively ascribing his actions to schizophrenia or to anything else.
I only know that right now I feel great sadness and sympathy for the victims and their families.
PeakVT
@Emily: The problem is that the amount of money that would need to be invested is unknown but probably very large (billions) at this point. So, no immediate benefit, which is pretty much the time frame a vulture PE firm thinks in.
Tim F.
@Litlebritdifrnt: That is also a characteristic behavior pattern of a person falling into schizophrenia. The booby-trapped apartment just makes my suspicion even stronger – even normal anti-government crazies don’t sleep next to explosive devices set on a hair trigger.
El Cid
@Roger Moore: It’s also possible — in fact, at the moment, true — that such syndromes are, besides being very, very difficult to study, much less ‘cure’, complex combinations of different particular biological conditions.
In addition, they often appear to be very complicated interactions between genetic factors, epigenetic activity, and environmental influences.
So, a cure might be possible, it might not be, and it might be around the corner or never or any number of combinations of more specific or more general or more or less effective treatments.
amk
with all the meticulous planning and a booby trapped house ? not buying it.
Roger Moore
@PeakVT:
Nonetheless, drug companies continue to pour lots of money into developing new drugs. I was just involved (very peripherally) in a new drug application earlier this year. There are certainly some investors who are willing to pour money into longer-term projects in the hopes of longer-term profits. The problem is that the most profitable drugs aren’t necessarily the most socially valuable ones. Drugs that treat symptoms without doing anything for the underlying condition are much more profitable [ETA: and often much cheaper to develop] than ones that cure people quickly. Drugs for common lifestyle problems like ED or heartburn are more profitable than ones for rare but terrible diseases. We wind up with investment that’s not well directed for social utility.
Swishalicious
I’ve been incredibly disturbed by the media reaction to this – instant politics, all the time. What does it mean for gun control? Was the shooter a Tea Partier or a liberal? Was he a Muslim? And so forth. I find it truly depraved and disgusting.
Cillizza at the WaPo immediately put something up about how this may or may not affect gun control legislation. Coincidentally, he started hosting a live chat at 11am, where I felt I had to ask him if he was insane. Here’s a link, mine is the first question.
live.washingtonpost.com/live-fix-120720.html
wrb
@El Cid:
Is there anything too awful for Bane??
Seriously, I found my gut reaction was “what is the big deal? Why are people changing their schedules?”
Back at the time of the OK bombing or the Columbine shooting
those seemed like big deals, and of course everything stopped.
But now… Colorado is on fire, Kansas is boiling, it is raining in Saudi, a bomb went off in Israel, a Syrian village
was destroyed…. it is Friday and a theater was shot up. Is there any actual news today?
dimmic rat
It’s simple, he killed the batfans.
SatanicPanic
@hep kitty: Does it make me a bad person that I lol’d at this?
Gus
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: Political maybe. Coherent? I don’t think so. He posed a question of Giffords at a town meeting, “What is government if words have no meaning?” He didn’t like here answer.
SatanicPanic
And good for Obama calling this what it is- Terrorism. The man continues to impress me.
hueyplong
“Note to self: avoid S&M room at the GOP convention.”
Isn’t that more generally described as the convention floor?
As for the shooting, setting aside the mental health angle, the one thing we know for sure is that there will be no step taken in the direction of controling access to guns by anyone, anywhere (other than sporting events). In the current state of the political world, hardly anything can happen that the far right don’t approve, and they apparently consider this to be the most important thing in the world. If a random, disturbed person shooting Saint Ronald Fking Raygun couldn’t lead to a change, nothing can.
So that’s that. We’re just going to have to reconcile ourselves to the idea that at any time, there may be random gunplay in a crowded public place, and the relatives of the dead will have to console themselves with (1) it was just Timmy’s time to go to Jesus and (2) the shooter wouldn’t have squeezed of more than a couple of dozen rounds if only they’d all been packing.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Tim F.: Those are quite frank signs of paranoia becoming florid. It is indeed a horrific disease. The (slightly)good news is that some of the newer long acting anti-pscyhotics are injectable, which can offer longer periods without breaks, though they have their own downsides. But that treatment approach is dramatically improving the lives of some patients, especially when begun early after presentations of symptoms.
Mattminus
@shoutingattherain:
I don’t think this calculus is wrong. I’m not keen on giving up my rights to protect me from an astronomically unlikely event.
We have no right to drive a car, and they cause far more damage, yet no one is agitating to take them away.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Bullshit.
The whole point of vaccination, for example, is to stop illness before it even can begin. People get the clap, get a shot, get cured. That’s the fucking basic dynamic.
Diagnosis and treatment of mental illness is still freaking primitive, barely medicine, hardly science. Too often medication does not even bring mental illness until control, but merely renders people passive so that they can be warehoused comfortably.
And shit, I had a friend who was mentally ill, but the doctors could not quite figure out the proper diagnosis, the proper medicine or the proper dosage of the medication he should be given. In effect, he became a guinea pig. And because he could not be held indefinitely, he left the hospital and became homeless (his parents could not control or help him), but found that for a time he could partly bring his symptoms under control by self-medicating himself with coffee and cigarettes. The irony was that the treatment facility, of course, forbade smoking.
There is no point in this thread doodling off into meaningless pseudo science and quackery, or mindless drivel about Big Medicine and Big Pharma. There is no nation, no society, no community on this planet which has solved the dilemma of mental illness, and no evidence, hints or signs that anyone is withholding cures or treatment merely for the sake of profit.
PeakVT
@Roger Moore: I understand. I was just pointing out the time frame and risk profile is completely at different from what a “business” like Bain would accept.
A paper on some alternative funding mechanisms is here.
Smiling Mortician
@Culture of Truth:
That the current crop of grownups in this country has completely fucking blown it. Across the board.
jeffery bahr
“I’ll simply point out that to be able to shoot 60 plus people and kill 12 of them in a dark theater.”
No, it just takes repealing the large-clip and assault rifle ban. He didn’t shoot all those people with a shotgun.
Someguy
So the shooter did this at the premier of a movie that has been reviewed as being one of the most graphic & sadistically violent films released this year.
So we’re here talking about the shooter and wondering why he’d choose to do something like this at the site where a couple hundred people gathered to engage in some sado-voyeurism, something we we consider quite normal…
Raven
@NCSteve: Agreed, the people were jammed in. It doesn’t take much to eject a magazine, lock and load another and keep firing.
Chyron HR
@Mattminus:
Cars are not weapons. Try again.
(That’s okay, we can wait until Rush gives you another talking point to parrot.)
amused
@Smiling Mortician: My sister was in med school on a scholarship and no one knew a thing until she went walking nekkid down main street. In winter, in a snow storm. It’s not as easy to spot as you might think. Most schizophrenics are really smart even after they present.
This post is kind of disturbing in that it assumes mental illness when just plain asshole is more likely the cause. Doesn’t help at all with mental illness advocacy, IMO.
Raven
@jeffery bahr: Repeal shlemiel, shit is all over the place.
Mattminus
@Chyron HR:
So, it makes no difference that non-weapons kill far more people than weapons do on any given day? And that we have a clear constitutional right to have weapons? You’d probably be all for banning speech that you think is “dangerous” too, huh?
Also, too you’re a fucking idiot for assuming that there’s no way a liberal can be supportive of gun rights.
Cassidy
@Culture of Truth: Yeah, like there is only one.
Sadly updated for modern times
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Culture of Truth:
A PhD in Neuroscience, no less… WTF?
amk
OT – After David Corn, it’s Globe’s turn to hit mitt today.
SatanicPanic
@Mattminus: I’m not agitating to take cars away, but anyone in their right mind would admit that we have too many cars, that our cars are too big, that cars are dangerous, especially when driven by people not in their right mind and that as a society it was a failure of planning that we are so reliant on them.
Ed Drone
@El Cid:
No, he left in 1999, remember.
Ed
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@amused:
I am tempted to agree with you, and on general principle, I certainly do. It is the apartment scenario that suggests to me there may be some brain pathology involved, as it is almost a classic example of paranoia in bloom.
And I suspect Tim F did not intend to question the intelligence of those with schizophrenia. We have a state NAMI board member who has a Ph.D and was diagnosed 30+ years ago with schizophrenia. He frequently observes that without treatment, he would no longer be alive.
Smiling Mortician
@Mattminus:
There’s a difference between supporting gun rights and making an egregiously false analogy. The primary function of the automobile is transportation. What’s the primary function of a gun again?
pseudonymous in nc
@Brachiator:
That’s a cop-out. Mental illness is still the poor relation when it comes to healthcare provision in the developed world, but there are places and systems that handle it better than others.
Raven
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Friday that the shootings that took place in an Aurora, Colo. movie theater hours earlier were a result of “ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs” and questioned why nobody else in the theater had a gun to take down the shooter.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Gus:
I believe GG was targeted, explicitly (essentially stalked and hunted). That makes it, by definition, political.
But was that attack ‘coherent’? certainly not. Here of all places, we should know that one doesn’t automatically imply the other.
This? Totally random. You don’t smoke up a room when you have particular targets in mind. He just wanted to spray bullets into the smoke, not caring who or what he hit.
Also note that there’s no proof yet that JH has schizophrenia, or any other mental illnes, and we shouldn’t assume he does just because his actions are incomprehensible to us.
Martin
@Brachiator: Not to mention, it’s really goddamn easy to figure out where polio or chickenpox comes from via each individual person. We have no fucking clue why most mental illnesses manifest – what causes them, or even how the brain chemistry is being altered. Mental illness treatment isn’t far removed from randomly shoving pills into people and seeing what works. The brain science just isn’t anywhere close to where it needs to be to cure people as you would a bacterial infection or a viral transmission.
There’s no big Pharma conspiracy here as you note. The only criticisms I can think of that should be leveled here don’t even target the medical community – it’s that we’ve always treated mental illness as shameful and broadly as undeserving of medical treatment. Depressed people should just get off their asses and aberrant behaviors should just be disciplined harder. Fuck, just 4 presidents back publicly stated that homosexuality was a disease and maybe those people needed to just pray harder and stop being so faggy. If there’s no cure for illnesses like schizophrenia, it’s our own fucking fault for refusing to fund brain science.
My grandfather was diagnosed schizophrenic after WWII. He wasn’t – he was suffering from PTSD, but the VA wouldn’t recognize and treat that condition, so the doctors dropped a label on him that the VA would treat. But the behavior wasn’t far removed. When he was out of the hospital, he’d go home to his 5 kids and periodically get up in the middle of the night and turn the gas on in the oven. My grandmother would wake up to him standing over her with a knife. It was a fucking scary household to live in, and my grandmother (a nurse) was ostracized from the Catholic family because of her inability to cure him – as if praying harder or feeding him better would have fixed it. We’ve been suffering as a nation under untreated mental illnesses and done fuckall about it – not because its economically favorable to continue this, but because we’re a nation of goddamn irrational rugged individualist assholes that believe that allowing your fellow citizen to suffer is a noble act.
wrb
@Raven:
That one just can’t lose.
Either the shooter was a satanic bat fan attacking Christians or he was driven over the edge by our satanic society.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Raven: He really is an idiot of astounding proportions. Law schools in Texas must let anyone in. I think I read somewhere that he was a TX judge before his congressional career? Frightening.
Oh, and welcome back!
Raven
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: Rounds will bounce off a sloped concrete floor nicely.
amused
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I don’t think Tim F was maligning the intelligence of schizophrenics, actually; I was more concerned with the tendency to speculate mental illness in general when these things happen. Sorry I didn’t articulate it very well. Most of the time, it’s just another asshole lashing out. Paranoid people aren’t necessarily schizophrenics – look at Glen Beck, for example. As for the booby trapped apartment, he may have just been hoping for more victims.
It could be another Loughner, but then, it could just be another murderous asshole. Right now, we don’t know, is all I’m saying and assuming mental illness is just as wrong as assuming Muslim terrorist, IMO.
Raven
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I’m jet laggin like a mofo!
Violet
@Culture of Truth:
Any medical student will tell you, it’s much easier to get into med school than it is to leave. Once you’re in, they’re invested in you and don’t want you to quit. They are not invested in you welfare; they’re invested in you finishing.
I personally knew several medical students who were desperate to leave. One was persuaded to finish after a bit of time off. He graduated but never practiced. Another developed mental instability and wanted to quit and they absolutely wouldn’t let her drop out. She finally fled to an organic farm in another part of the country and her mental illness developed further. They didn’t want her to leave despite her public breakdowns. They think that’s just because the program is hard.
Corpsicle
@Brachiator: This.
It is so frustrating to realize that the psychiatrist you are paying way too much money to is essentially trying drugs at random. I know it’s unfair, but I’ve grown to despise shrinks. So many are smug arrogant douchebags, but they are really not much more than witch doctors.
SatanicPanic
@wrb: satanic bat fans attacking Christians – rumors of this are greatly exaggerated
Martin
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I had a neighbor a number of years back who was a brilliant social scientist but was also schizophrenic. He’d go off his meds now and then – may be 2x a year – and we’d work with him, his employer and the police to help get him back on track – mostly to spot it early on. He was a large black man – maybe 6′ 3″ – and when he was off his meds he’d continue on with many of his daily routines, but he’d do these loud verbal tics like someone with tourettes. So he’d do his daily grocery shopping, hooting and hollering in the grocery store, and then forget to pay and just walk out the doors. It really freaked people the fuck out, and we always worried about him being assaulted (or assaulting others – we didn’t know if he’d ever turn violent, but we never saw evidence of that). He had no family, lived alone, so we looked out for him. When he was on his meds, he was a really fascinating guy to talk to and and kind as could be.
NCSteve
@Litlebritdifrnt: Farm supply store and the nearest gas station?
Martin
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Now, now. Let’s not rule out that he might just be mentally ill.
Tim F.
@amused: I do not assume mental illness caused this person to shoot people. Rather I suggest that mental illness is a likely alternative to the political motivations that people have already started throwing around. The point being, even if we find out that he hung around one extreme group or another we should still reserve judgment until we know whether he was in control of his faculties.
The Moar You Know
@Smiling Mortician: Making one feel manly, of course!
I say this with some bitterness as a person who believes that we should be allowed to own guns – only after going through a strict testing and licensing program, and only after obtaining insurance sufficient to mitigate the damage that one can do with the firearm one purchases.
In short, I find the guns and cars analogy entirely appropriate and insist that, at a minimum, we should require the same responsibilities from gun owners that we require from car owners.
Mattminus
@Smiling Mortician:
I don’t know, that would depend on who you ask, wouldn’t it? Some might say “protection” for example.
Anyway it’s not a false analogy, it’s meant to show how we all shut our brains off when we see something like this. People want to “do something” when there’s really nothing to do, because, from a risk assessment point of view, it’s really not a big deal. We accept many other much greater risks all the time. If one were to do the research, I suspect the likelihood of dying in a mass shooting is probably roughly equivalent to that of drowning in a bucket. Not a good basis for giving up rights in my opinion.
Nemesis
No tbagger connection?
Que the victim blather from the right in 3..2..1…
In fact freerepublic and twitchy are already on it.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@amused: Your point is an excellent one, and assuming mental illness is in fact an example of stigma in action. And it *is* generally just another asshole acting out. Thank you for the perspective.
Brachiator
@pseudonymous in nc:
Really? Where? And the argument from Roger Moore was the implication that cures for mental illness were being withheld so that money could be made from prolonging mental illness.
Yeah, there are places where there is humane treatment, but where in this world are there cures that are being withheld in the US by evil capitalist drug companies?
And I might even dispute the notion of better treatment elsewhere. My gut, as well as my experience, suggests that warehousing is more the norm. And not just here, but elsewhere in the developed world are horror stories of patients being sexually or physically abused.
And as an aside, we also have the issue of depression, which some religions even refuse to acknowledge as a mental illness and which even some lay people ascribe to selfishness or other factors, especially when a depressed person commits suicide. Some of the comments I saw in various blogs and news sites about the death of Mary Kennedy were among the most ignorant that I have ever read on any topic anywhere (and note here that I am not talking about reactions here in Balloon Juice, for what it’s worth).
Anyway, my point here is that our general understanding of mental illness is abysmal and often just a step above the kind of primitive superstition that in the past ascribed most illness to demons or inflictions by the gods.
Todd
It isn’t going to be popular, but I’m going to say it.
Put him down like you would a rabid dog. There is no redemption or value to him worth saving. Tough shit for his family, but I’ve seen this all too many times, and there are inevitably multiple failures to intervene when there could be help, all along with multiple coddlings, usually by mommy, and usually out of guilt over stingy cost concerns when solid treatment could have benefitted.
The other thing that irritates me is the fetishization of the eccentric, the different, the paranoid and the violent, and the extent to which they are legally and socially coddled.
Felanius Kootea
@Litlebritdifrnt: I wish he could have gotten help when he withdrew from Med school: for someone to go from wanting to be a doctor and save lives to taking them in the most horrible way is tragic. As someone who had a relative that suffered from schizophrenia, the worst part is not being able to do much until they realize they have a problem. In my relative’s case, that came 10 years after she was officially diagnosed. Luckily, she didn’t physically harm herself (first worry) or anyone else.
El Cid
@Ed Drone: Bain isn’t a human — he’s a corporate person. They never truly leave. They live forever. They never go to jail. Their punisments are always passed down to the weak. When killed they can rise again, their organs scattering to reform under a different name. If Bane falls, Bane LLC can always take its place.
Mattminus
@Todd:
“The other thing that irritates me is the fetishization of the eccentric, the different, the paranoid and the violent, and the extent to which they are legally and socially coddled.”
yeah, why can’t the cops just round up all the weirdos and hippies? What could go wrong with that?
WereBear
There was a system in the 1800’s based on the idea of creating a low stress environment for mental illness treatment; I think the Quakers were involved. I understand it worked really well; but as can be imagined, it was more labor intensive than drugs.
If it seems like a quaint relic to us now, it only shows the unreasonable expectations we presently put on those who are mentally ill. They cannot cope with the stress; and we create a bunch of financial, schedule, transportation, and organizational hurdles for them to leap over in addition to their usual life… which they already cannot handle.
Not very bright of us, at all.
wrb
@El Cid:
The shooter could have been Bane last night yet by now Bane has left him and is reassembling elsewhere.
Todd
@Mattminus:
For the past 20 years, we’ve treated weird white people with gun fetishes with kid gloves. Randy Weaver lived and got paid. Wingers squeal about Waco. Eric Rudolph and his abettors still draw breath.
Mnemosyne
@Mattminus:
Both cars and their owners are licensed and easily identifiable. You have to prove that you are competent and understand the rules of the road before you are allowed to have a license to drive a car.
So you’re calling for guns to be licensed and regulated the same way we do cars, right?
jkr
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I don’t have a citation, but have read in various professional sources that the “Corrections” (hah!) system is by far the biggest provider of mental-health services in the US.
(As to the services they provide…when a patient of mine was incarcerated, they took him off most of his meds and refused to let me see him because “he is receiving treatment here.” He told me that there were only addictions-treatment groups, and he’s probably reliable on this.)
(And when I jumped through hoops to get a visitor’s pass, I was still refused…the officer-sheriff, I think–in charge said gee, he wondered this guy had only female visitors, and strongly implied that I wasn’t trying to visit for professional reasons despite my submitting professional references and qualifications.)
Mattminus
@Todd:
Maybe because being white, weird and into guns isn’t a crime. Anyway, those are some strange examples you chose. Murdering half a guys family is “kid gloves”? 4 consecutive life sentences is coddling?
FormerSwingVoter
@Corpsicle:
Some are decent, or even good, and some are totally idiots. The problem is that there’s no way to tell.
My doctor has put me on some mood stabilizers after I went through a really rough go of things and it’s basically saved my life. But I’m a textbook case: in symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment. Lots of folks aren’t so textbook (or are ashamed and hide the things that make them textbook), and most mental health professionals don’t seem to have the tools needed to adjust to that.
We need to do more. But there’s a lot of guesswork involved in that.
Mattminus
@Mnemosyne:
Sure.
Smiling Mortician
@Mattminus:
Wrong. I didn’t ask about the intent of the user. I asked about the primary function of the tool.
@The Moar You Know:
This is an argument I can respect.
pseudonymous in nc
@Brachiator:
I’m not making that argument. I am making the argument that the US handles mental illness worse than countries with actual healthcare systems, that the usual suspects among the states handle mental illness worse than the more enlightened ones, and that Americans are support public mental health treatment for PTSD-afflicted veterans and (at a stretch) people in prison, but nobody else. Throwing up your hands and asserting that it’s all “barely medicine, hardly science” is a cop-out and an insult.
Joel
I think to simply dismiss these acts of mass violence as merely the result of mental illness is unfair to the millions of mentally ill people who never commit acts of violence – never mind mass violence. These people are something less.
Joel
I think to simply dismiss these acts of mass violence as merely the result of mental illness is unfair to the millions of mentally ill people who never commit acts of violence – never mind mass violence. These people are something less.
Joel
I think to simply dismiss these acts of mass violence as merely the result of mental illness is unfair to the millions of mentally ill people who never commit acts of violence – never mind mass violence. These people are something less.
Brachiator
@Todd:
You are not being unpopular.
You’re being stupid.
This may not be popular, but I had to say it.
Nobody I know of puts the eccentric and the violent in the same group, let alone coddles them.
And the funny thing about civil liberties. We have, and sometimes still do, wrongly institutionalized vulnerable eccentrics, not to help them, but for our own convenience.
pkdz
@pseudonymous in nc</a
Research has shown that people with schizophrenia do better in poor countries than in developed countries:
mindfreedom.org/kb/mental-health-global/sartorius-on-who/
Todd
@Mattminus:
Once you pull that standoff bullshit, the consequences to you and those of your family that you’ve talked into joining your crusade of stupid are no longer of concern to me – society has become abandoned at that point. As to Weaver, far as I’m concerned, he killed his own family. Rudolph and his abettors should have died for their crimes, and the DP should’ve remained on the table pending his naming of his white christian terrorist friends.
JPL
According the NYTimes, the police chief of nyc said the CO shooter had painted his hair red and he was The Joker.
JPL
Kelly is good friends with the police chief in CO.
TooManyJens
@JPL: Why would the police chief of NYC know that?
Edit: and, you beat me to it. OK, thanks.
JoyfulA
@Culture of Truth: Some years back in Philly, an MD enrolled in a psychiatric residency shot and killed a couple of strangers downtown. He had recently been released from the Army on account of bizarre behavior and bought a pile of guns in Virginia.
That’s a lot of checkpoints that should have stopped him before this tragedy.
JPL
@TooManyJens: Here is the info from the nytimes
New York City Police Commissiner Raymond W. Kelly said the suspect in the shootings had red-painted hair that resembled the character “The Joker” from the Batman comics and movies.
Mr. Kelly was speaking outside New York’s Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan but did not offer how he knew about the suspect’s appearance.
Tony Aiello, a reporter from CBS News, highlighted Mr. Kelly’s comment on Twitter and gave an indication of why the police chief in New York would know details of the ongoing investigation in Colorado.
JPL
whoops a link would be nice also
link
JPL
I shouldn’t jump to conclusions about the hair color because I guess lots of folks dressed for the event.
Brachiator
@pseudonymous in nc:
OK. Totally different argument, and totally different direction.
General treatment of mental illness vs cure.
Still, which countries are you referring to? You may be right, but who knows?
Sorry, I have hardly thrown up my hands, and I have no idea who I am supposedly insulting.
Making an observation about the general state of medicine with respect to mental illness is not the same thing as saying that current medicine is totally worthless or that we do nothing. The point here was that anyone who thinks that mental illness can easily be cured or that cures are being deliberately withheld is lying.
However, even “enlightened” mental health treatment is sometimes little more than warehousing people and at best making them comfortable. And at the worst, it is little better than Bedlam.
BTW, I think that dentistry is sometimes barely medicine. Yeah, there is much curative and restorative work done, but just as often it is a matter of chipping away at teeth, digging stuff out, and replacing teeth with metal bits than it is curing or maintaining anything. Some of the equipment more closely resembles what you would find at a hardware store than a medical supply company.
By the way, in December 2011, the WHO delivered this blistering report:
There is nothing here that suggests that the US is particularly bad, or that some other countries are particularly enlightened.
The mentally ill are often vulnerable, and are treated with contempt and disrespect. This adds to the dilemmas related to coming up with effective medications and other therapy.
Corpsicle
@FormerSwingVoter: @FormerSwingVoter: I’m really glad they helped you, and I know you’re right, there are many decent people in the field of psychiatry. And shitty though the science is, at least its a step up from leeches and a good beating. I just wish we as a society spent more on mental health research. Physical medicine has been a respected science for thousands of years, mental health for maybe a hundred.
Elie
@hep kitty:
And even when people get help, treatments are frequently difficult. Many psychoactive medications have real side effects and its not uncommon for people to “go off” medications when the side effects seem worse than their impairment. Many times, their impairment may feel “right”, “normal” and “good” — so by definition, treatment means changing them to a less diserable sense of self. It is also very hard to get continuous treatment by a psychiatrist/psychologist who truly cares about you… many want to just do medication management and not much other interaction.
So its hard all around. Without a doubt, it is better to be treated than not and to struggle towards the right kinds or mix of chemotherapy and counseling. All that, of course, takes money and resources and most psych programs as cited above, are under enormous financial pressure and the outcomes much harder to point to as “successes”. No one can point to the number of cases like this “avoided”. They are rare in any case and there is no way to know what horrors are avoided when x number or types of patients receive treatment.
I am afraid we are still very much in the dark ages with this.
lamh35
Slightly OT and I know that at times like these I know there is no “political etiquette”, but was is inappropriate for Romney to give an on camera statement rather than a written one. Obama was on camera, but he was supposed to be at a rally, and he is the POTUS. I was just wondering about that.
Davis X. Machina
12:30 AM (EDT) I got a robo-call from Wayne LaPierre…. hung up.
Life’s like comedy — it’s mostly timing.
Brachiator
@JPL:
The Joker doesn’t have red hair.
Todd
@Joel:
This. A thousand times this.
We’re not looking at a snap reaction followed by beating, stabbing, strangulation or a quick shooting.
This was an episode which didn’t erupt, but was instead the culmination of a plan.
Questions I have:
1. Why did Arlene (the mad dog’s mother) so instantly think it was her son?
2. Where would a student who was mentally ill come up with the resources to purchase his weapons, magazines, ammo, smoke grenades and tear gas?
Joel
Salman Rushdie twitter:
twitter.com/SalmanRushdie
El Cid
@Brachiator: The Joker, meanwhile, condemned this act of violence as “way, way below the standards people have come to expect from a truly worldscale mastermind of chaos such as I. I wouldn’t hire this guy as one of my henchmen if he were the last crazed shooter on Earth. Also, for impersonating me, tell him to expect a special visit, maybe soon, maybe not, but stay on your toes.”
Brachiator
@Corpsicle:
Physical medicine arguably has only been able to offer meaningful cures and treatments for about 200 years. Mental health related medicine has made long strides, but still has long to go.
The history of psychiatry during this period is often crazy, by comparison:
Lunatic asylums began to appear in the Industrial Era. Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) introduced new medical categories of mental illness, which eventually came into psychiatric usage despite their basis in behavior rather than pathology or etiology. In the 1920s surrealist opposition to psychiatry was expressed in a number of surrealist publications. In the 1930s several controversial medical practices were introduced including inducing seizures (by electroshock, insulin or other drugs) or cutting parts of the brain apart (leucotomy or lobotomy). Both came into widespread use by psychiatry, but there were grave concerns and much opposition on grounds of basic morality, harmful effects, or misuse. In the 1950s new psychiatric drugs, notably the antipsychotic chlorpromazine, were designed in laboratories and slowly came into preferred use. Although often accepted as an advance in some ways, there was some opposition, due to serious adverse effects such as tardive dyskinesia. Patients often opposed psychiatry and refused or stopped taking the drugs when not subject to psychiatric control. There was also increasing opposition to the use of psychiatric hospitals, and attempts to move people back into the community on a collaborative user-led group approach (“therapeutic communities”) not controlled by psychiatry. Campaigns against masturbation were done in the Victorian era and elsewhere. Lobotomy was used until the 1970s to treat schizophrenia. This was denounced by the anti-psychiatric movement in the 1960s and later.
Valdivia
@Joel:
wow.
El Cid
“If I did something that was wrong – I would apologize.”
— George Zimmerman to Sean Hannity
vheidi
@JPL: Kelly is
good friends with the police chief in CO.an attention whoreFTFY
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
That’s not what I was saying, or at least not what I was trying to say. My point is that drug companies don’t even have any cures for mental illness to withhold because they aren’t spending any money on developing them. They rarely work on cures or preventatives for anything because they’re profit seeking rather than public benefit seeking organizations, and for chronic illnesses it’s much more profitable to treat the symptoms than cure the underlying condition.
Take a look at where our development money is actually going. Vaccines are mostly developed by governments and non-profits. We have almost no new antibiotics, even though they’re critically necessary in the face of growing antibiotic resistance, because drug companies aren’t spending money on developing them. Meanwhile, we have multiple “me too” boner pills and heartburn pills because those are very profitable. It’s one more example of why it’s inappropriate to apply the profit motive to human health; you get very inefficient outcomes.
jurassicpork
The Top 10 Conservative Reactions to the Aurora Shooting.
jurassicpork
The Top 10 Conservative Reactions to the Aurora Shooting.
pseudonymous in nc
@Brachiator:
Mental health professionals in public health environments, perhaps? I acknowledge your expertise in Looking Shit Up On Wikipedia, but I suspect that it doesn’t extend much further.
AxelFoley
@The Moar You Know:
Bingo. The muthafucka planned this out. He even had his apartment booby-trapped.
Fuck that noise. Every time some white dude shoots up a place, folks want to excuse it with mental illness. Let a black dude or Latino dude do the same and people would want them strung up.
Stop the damn excuses.
Patricia Kayden
I agree that we shouldn’t be speculating about the shooter. Coming from Canada where they just had a tragic shooting at a shopping center, I noticed this:
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/1229429–jessica-redfield-victim-of-colorado-theatre-shooting-was-also-at-eaton-centre-shooting
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
My contention is that the current level of understanding is the issue, not the deliberate actions of drug companies. Do you have any actual evidence to support your assertions?
None of this is really true, or overstates the case.
The same arguments are made about cancer and other ailments.
I agree that more should be spent on basic research and on other areas. But whether a massive redirection to mental health would result in cures is more about hope and speculation than any reasonable conclusion about how easy or difficult it would be to cure mental illness. And this is also a very different than your earlier implication that there is a deliberate attempt to provide drugs that do little more than prolong mental illness.
I don’t think that profit driven medical spending guarantees results; on the other hand, I don’t see that “taking the profit out” guarantees either efficiency or efficacy.
Cassidy
@AxelFoley: But, NEW BLACK PANTHER PARTY, NEW BLACK PANTHER PARTY!
Villago Delenda Est
@Emily:
The problem is, it’s not CERTAIN that you’ll invent it in the current fiscal quarter, where it can affect our short term bottom line.
Therefore, it’s the sort of expenditure of effort that can’t pay off soon enough for them to care.
Hypatia's Momma
@Roger Moore:
How much do you know about medicinal chemistry, the range of mental illnesses, and the factors at play in their development and expression?
MattR
@Joel:
Only if you think of mental illness as a monolithic disease. Instead it is a range of diseases that affect different people in different ways. I am not saying mental illness was what caused the rampage, but I am saying that it is a definite possibility that mental illness was the cause and that with proper treatment it is possible that James Holmes would be horrified and remorseful for what he did (and would have no urges to repeat that behavior)
AxelFoley
@Cassidy:
I know, right. Oh, and to add to what I said earlier: imagine if this shooter had been Muslim/Arabic.
Matter of fact, does anyone recall if the media speculated if the Fort Hood shooter, Nadal Hasan, was mentally ill? All I recall is them wondering if he had ties to Al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
Brachiator
@pseudonymous in nc:
RE: I have no idea who I am supposedly insulting.
Nope. Sorry.
The point of providing a Wikipedia link is to provide a quick, easily referenced link for everyone. I could provide other citations, but are you willing to spend the money to access them?
And it is sadly obvious that you lack any expertise in much of anything, or are incapable of demonstrating it here.
Now, I previously cited a WHO report about abuses in mental health care world wide (not a Wikipedia reference, by the way). Do you have anything that contradicts it or adds to the discussion?
If not, you and I are done here, and I leave you to anyone else who wants to waste time dealing with you.
Have a nice day.
Origuy
@MattR: We’re just starting to learn about brain chemistry. Medications for the same symptoms can have entirely different effects. An anti-depressant that works for one person can cause another to be suicidal.
elm
Hadn’t Rush Limbaugh been talking about how the new Batman movie was a liberal plot against Romney (since the villain’s name is Bane and Romney ran Bain Capital).
Leaving that aside, two notable factors (already mentioned) stand out.
1. It’s easy for seriously mentally-ill people (i.e. people suffering delusions) to get firearms.
2. It’s difficult for mentally-ill people to get treatment for their illness.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Hypatia’s Momma: That is rather the pertinent question.
Elie
@Todd:
Normal transects abnormal all the time. A severely mentally ill person can still be mentally “organized” enough to plan down to the last detail. That means acquiring licenses, the right materials for the job and also singling out one or more victims for their wrath. Planning does not make severe mental illness a non consideration. It just signals that despite the illness, an individual can sometimes put together a great deal of seemingly “logical” or rational activities and stay focused enough to carry out their objectives. They are still REALLY sick. REALLY.
Elie
@Origuy:
Yep — absolutely agree
MattR
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): That’s funny because my initial reaction was that those questions were completely off topic. They might have some relevance in a discussion about the difficulty of curing mental illness, but they are unrelated to whether or not drug companies are currently spending money doing research on mental illness.
@Origuy: Absolutely agree with this as well.
Darkrose
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
Here’s something that should scare you:
I’m being medicated for anxiety and depression issues. I’ve been to the ER more than once for suicidal ideation, but I’ve never been actually hospitalized. I have a history of self-injury.
Since I don’t have a criminal record, I could totally buy a gun. At least in CA there’s a waiting period, but if I wanted to drive across the border to Nevada, I could walk up and buy military-grade hardware, no questions asked.
Mnemosyne
@AxelFoley:
You don’t have to imagine — the guy who was killed by security after he went on a shooting spree at the El Al counter at LAX in 2002 was officially declared a “terrorist” by the FBI even though he committed the crime on his birthday a few weeks after his wife left him and took the kids back to Egypt with her.
It looked pretty clearly to me like a classic mass murder where part of the guy’s plan is to go down in a blaze of glory being shot by police, but he was Arab (Egyptian) and El Al is Israel’s airline, so he was an official “terrorist.”
(I wanted to link to the Wikipedia article but for some reason my browser doesn’t like Wikipedia right now.)
(ETA to correct my description of the event since it sounded less violent than it actually was.)
Davis X. Machina
@Darkrose: Article I, Section 16 of the State of Maine Constitution — “Every citizen has a right to keep and bear arms and this right shall never be questioned.” As amended by a referendum in 1987, which also removed “for the common defence”. The clause is applied to no other right in the state constitution.
Hypatia's Momma
@MattR:
You can’t separate the difficulty of tracking down one specific cause for a particular mental illness from how much money is spent on research and development to alleviate or cure that illness. It’s impossible.
Mental illnesses are more varied than cancers and have multiple possible causes, both organic and inorganic in origin.
Simply getting a drug that can act as an adjuctant to Prozac to the Phase 3 stage took many years and a LOT of money and it still might not be approved for Phase 4 because the severe side-effects might be too prevalent in too many patients. And that’s just for chronic depression, something which is relatively well-studied and which affects millions (which means you have a large and statistically diverse pool from which to draw volunteers for trials).
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Darkrose: Anyone where I live can buy a gun every odd weekend. We have regular gun shows.
Fun fact. A guy I know who worked the fields here (no papers, no literacy, no English, no Spanish) bought a gun from a vendor at one, and was promptly rounded up by ICE/DHS agents and deported. No paperwork. And the agents did not even approach the vendor.
Furthermore, there’s a good reason that these agents roam the gun shows. They know how it works.
Without traipsing into the issue of immigration (legal or otherwise) – this was just for illustrative purposes – consider that agents stalk these shows because they are well aware that firearms are sold without so much as a signature. It’s scary.
Elie
@Hypatia’s Momma:
THIS.THIS.THIS
Thanks
Darkrose
@Brachiator:
Exactly. Even when there is a diagnosis, figuring out which combination of medication will work for a given person and have manageable side effects is trial and error. When I first went on SSRI’s, they tried Zoloft. I wasn’t as depressed–but I gained 60 pounds in 3 months. So I got switched to Paxil, which left me incapable of functioning. Finally, Prozac worked, but my dosage has been adjusted multiple times due to changes in life situation and getting older. And of course, there’s always the question of drug interactions. Coming up with an actual cure for any specific mental illness–especially one as complex as schizophrenia–is like trying to turn base metals into gold.
Darkrose
@danah gaz (fka gaz): The agents might keep an eye on me because I’m black, but the problem is that nothing about me would indicate that I have a history of mental illness. Because I’ve never actually been hospitalized, there’s nothing that would come up on a background check. And yet, someone with a recent history of self-injury probably shouldn’t own a gun.
I don’t know what the solution is. It’s just that knowing I could buy a gun makes me wonder who else can.
Tim F.
Anyone. Gaz’s story is the first time I heard of a person failing to waltz through the gun show loophole.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Tim F.: And that was only because they had made the decidedly poor choice to be short, brown, and indigenous looking.
The temerity of some people.
Neil
We don’t know the motives of the shooter. We don’t know if there is a mental illness involved. However, most people who happen to have schizophrenia are like myself, non-violent.
A weird misconception about mental illness involves morality. Often we degenerate the enemy–those that do harm–as “crazy” as a reason why they do bad things. Mental illness is like cancer, a fundamentally amoral disease which affects both good and bad people. It can make a bad person more unstable and do outrageous things, but diseases like schizophrenia can affect good people and even distort their reality enough that they cause harm (usually to themselves). Then there are people with mental illnesses (who comprise of one in five of the population) who appear as “normal” and as flawed as those who don’t share that particular burden.
In many cases people don’t want to get help with mental issues because of the stigma associated with such illnesses. Another large problem is that, (as others have noted in the comment thread) that because of poverty and other issues it is sometimes very difficult to get help to those that need it until they do something very extreme. Then the problem is made worse by the fact that the horrific nature of their actions can make it difficult for public opinion to mandate treatment rather than punishment. The hardest part is that there this amoral aspect of mental illness. There are bad people who are responsible for horrible things who happen to have mental health issues.
It’s an area of law that society seems fearful, if not desperate not to make a mistake in without realizing that it is impossible not to do so.
MattR
@Hypatia’s Momma:
I agree with all of that, but it is also irrelevant when Roger Moore’s point related to the combined spending across the entire spectrum of mental illness.
Hypatia's Momma
@MattR:
If you can’t grasp the difficulties in involved in even attempting to help alleviate clinical depression (and you don’t know how much money is spent on that research unless you work for Big Pharma), then you can’t claim they aren’t spending any money at all. All stages of research cost money. ALL of it, from the time spent gathering data on possible routes on which to focus, to design of the necessary active group(s) on the carrier molecule, synthesis, and initial testing before it hits public trials.
Claiming that drug companies aren’t spending any money at all on research into such medications is a ludicrous over-generalisation.
He said:
He might just as well have said drug companies aren’t spending any money on developing a cure for diabetes or hemophilia.