Guns and Mental Illness: Tragedies in Waiting

[MindMover]

Consider these scenarios. A popular college student leaves his fraternity house one day, stark naked. He walks three blocks to a stranger’s house, enters, turns on the TV and falls asleep. 
Moments later, the owner of the house finds him, takes aim with his Glock and kills the young man before he ever wakes up.

Or: an 18-year-old high school basketball star calls 911 to report child abuse because he can’t find any Chinese food in the house. When the police contact his mother, she rushes home to find her son sobbing on the front porch while a confused sergeant stares, watching his tears flow like rain.

Or: a young woman in Nebraska disappears the night before her parents’ thirtieth anniversary celebration—a surprise party she’d spent months planning. Two days later, she is found in Singapore, where she’s been picked up for shoplifting. Though Singapore has some of the harshest criminal penalties in the world, it also has some of the best mental-health care. So, rather than receiving a caning, the young woman is retrieved from a first-class hospital, diagnosed and medicated, her equilibrium restored.

Mental illness in the United States is misunderstood, criminalized, stigmatized and insufficiently covered even by so-called Cadillac insurance plans. If you think you don’t know anyone coping with psychosis or depression, you’re wrong: 58 million Americans (one in five) have some form of mental illness. If most of us don’t realize its prevalence, it’s surely because we’re afraid to talk about it. We’re a nation of fundamentalists about personal agency, and we’re skeptical of mental disorders as “real.” When a friend’s son wrote his family that he just wanted to lie down and die, one faction sent him Bible passages and told him to pray harder, while another sent him a copy of Ayn Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and told him to “take responsibility” for his life.

http://www.thenation.com/article/169294/guns-and-mental-illness-tragedies-waiting?rel=emailNation#

[cbrer]

1. We DON'T understand the mind

Neither its complexities, nor the millions of ways it can be affected.

Didn't this research fall off the federal budget during the Reagan years?

[Prester]

2. The problem is that they don't care.

Right about the time of the transition of Bush I/Clinton, they closed down the largest mental hospital in Oregon. They just opened the front doors and said "See ya!" to every patient.

They knew that many of these people had nowhere to go and no one to rely on. They simply tossed them out on the streets without batting an eyelash.

The current Republicans care nothing about these people. Treating them makes no money for their party. Therefore, they shall be wiped away like a speck of dirt and never thought of again.

[2on2u]

3. Thank you for this. Recced. n/t

[Odin2005]

4. I still run into people who think Asperger's is a "fictional" condition.

They think it's the result of "bratty" kids not being spanked, whipped, and belted like they used to in the "good old days".

We are an extraverted and sensate society, if it is not outwardly obvious then it not real to a lot of people.