Just look around the news over the last few days and you'll discover Very Serious Journalists discussing the fact that the American mental health treatment system is broken.
Because that's news to them. Not to the rest of us, of course.
Maybe the Santa Barbara Asswipe's family could have had him committed. They might have had the money for a private psychiatric hospital, if there was a bed available. But Asswipe was of full legal age and if he didn't want to be treated, there was probably no good way of forcing him. They would have had to hire a lawyer and file a petition for an involuntary commitment. Asswipe would have gotten his own lawyer (or had one appointed) to fight it. And unless it could clearly be shown that he was a danger to himself or the community, good luck with that.
A lot of the old hospitals were not places for healing. But they were places that housed people who were mentally ill. Now, we don't even do that. Those who are mentally ill end up in jail, on the streets, or if they are very lucky, they have families that can afford to care for them for their lifetimes. Some other lucky few may have a disability pension that will be enough to house them in a residential care facility, but a lot of those are more like the hospitals of old: Warehouses, only lots smaller.
None of this is news. Where we are now was probably not hard to forecast three or even four decades ago. The mental health treatment catastrofuck has been a very slow motion trainwreck, one that the politicians all ignored because there was no way to avoid it that did not involve spending public funds. And since one of the two main political parties has an unspoken position of "you should only die soon" towards the mentally ill (and the other party's position is essentially that of cowardice), we got the mental health system that we deserved.
Which is to say: Nothing at all.
So we'll just muddle on. Because there is no political will to fix this problem. Because there are the wingnut megaphone artists who would scream about coddling and shit if we tried. Serious (and lengthy) articles will be written by reporters and printed in various newspapers, and maybe one of them will get a Pulitzer Prize or something. But at the end of the day, we will be right where we are now.
In another year or two or three, another crazy young white dude will grab some guns or knives and go people-hunting. Afterwards, there will be stories in the papers of how disturbed that Jackhole of the Future was and how could it be that nobody could see the signs. There will be the mandatory hand-wringing by politicians and the press proclaiming that this time, something must be done to provide help to the mentally afflicted, at least those who are homicidally inclined. Once the story fades from the news cycles, not a damn thing will have been done. Not a single treatment center will have been funded, let alone built, anywhere in this country.
And so it will go.
We are so screwed.
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4 comments:
Consider the average mass event creator as our version of a suicide bomber. In more unstable parts of the world, an individual like this would have been identified and used as a suicide bomber or attacker...willing to kill him/herself in order to strike back. That's an "approved" outlet for his/her malfunction.
In societies where mental illness is handled in a better manner, these events are rarer, but not unknown. In the US, we willingly dismantled the mental health system and then failed to fund the replacement we promised in its place.
So now we have rage filled individuals with no approved outlet...except, maybe, the military or the police forces. But in both of these groups, the more outlying of the "disturbed" individuals are generally screened out. Next option is a private security force, and again a screen is likely to weed out the outliers, if only for the company's protection.
So now you have a rage filled, unstable individual with no outlet and no treatment. A recipe for an explosion, in a society that has very few ways to restrict such an otherwise law abiding from purchasing weapons of any sort. Add in that we handcuff the police, authorities and parents from intervening unless very high barriers are crossed, and we get disaster.
However, the same old argument will be trotted out about who decides who can and cannot and who will and will not. And there is a morsel of truth to it, but at some point we will reach a change point. What that point will be and what direction it will take, I don't know. I do however fear we are at least as likely to go off the deep end as to find a reasonable way to address this.
we are at least as likely to go off the deep end as to find a reasonable way to address this.
Well, yes. It's what we do in this country. Look, for example, at how long it has taken (decades) to realize that tossing people in jail for long sentences on nonviolent drug offenses is a bad idea.
Yes, Comrade, but given the stories out of New York (on pace for same number of small pot arrests as least yer) and Colorado (banks still won't let pot shops bank and are now dropping porn stars), we have realized, but our politicians and police haven't.
And in Texas, the Tea-hadists are about to get elected statewide!
I don't think we want to go back to a situation where people who are "different" can be locked up indefinitely in inhumane conditions on the whim of a family member or government official, but the current policy of largely ignoring them or putting them in prison must surely change.
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