Mental Illness, Tucson and the Urgent Need for Universal Care

[raccoon]

Published on Friday, January 21, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Mental Illness, Tucson and the Urgent Need for Universal Care

by Ed Weisbart

I don’t know whether Jared Loughner had health insurance coverage, but the terrible events in Tucson got me thinking about an uninsured patient I saw last month at a massive one-day mobile free clinic for the uninsured in North Carolina. This was an event sponsored by the apolitical non-partisan National Association of Free Clinics (NAFC) and it delivered free care to over 1,200 uninsured people.

I saw a very worried mother with her 22-year-old son. He had told her a week earlier that he was hearing voices that were telling him to hurt people. He told her he’d actually been hearing voices for seven years, but as it embarrassed him and they were never very scary he’d not mentioned it until last week. Now this new message was terrifying him, and the voices were becoming increasing compelling. He told me that he didn’t know how much longer he could continue to hold them off.

His mother had tried calling several local psychiatrists but they all refused to see him without insurance. She was reluctant to go to the local emergency room as they had given her a really difficult time in the past due to her own lack of insurance. She was about at her wits’ end, and then saw a notice about NAFC’s one-day free clinic...

...when our neighbors don’t have insurance, we’re all at risk too. My patient’s lack of insurance jeopardized each and every one of us. Partial solutions and incomplete answers are just not acceptable in a country like ours. We simply have to find a way to have universal access to high quality of care, or we will all continue to pay the price, sometimes at point-blank range.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/21-1

[Atypical Liberal]

1. That's a very good point.

...when our neighbors don’t have insurance, we’re all at risk too.

That's a very good point.

[elocs]

2. I'm more at risk from the neighbor's son who is doing drugs or in a gang

than the neighbor's son who is mentally ill who is likely more of a risk to himself than me or any of the other neighbors.

[Atypical Liberal]

3. That may be so.

That may be so, but it is still a compelling argument for better access to mental health care. If dangerous mentally unstable people can be identified through access to health care, that would be good.

[ashling]

9. Or possibly your neighbor's son with

undiagnosed tuberculosis or other contagious disease?

[Coyote_Bandit]

7. You should know that

Sixty percent of people with a substance use disorder also suffer from another form of mental illness.
http://www.nida.nih.gov/pdf/tib/comorbid.pdf

Youth gang members are often highly involved in drug use.
http://people.cornellcollege.edu/ccarlson/juvenile/factsheets/youthgangs.pdf

Given your stated concerns you should be far more interested in whether or not the mentally ill are able to secure a minimum level of meaningful accessible and affordable care. More likely than not the neighbor's son who is doing drugs or in a gang has some form of mental illness.

[HereSince1628]

4. One caveat--not every mentally ill person puts society at risk

Quantitatively, we have more to fear from the mentally well than we do the mentally ill.

Qualitatively, we have more to fear from substance abusers than the mentally ill.

Violence can be motivated by many things such as a political ideology (which may be cloaked in expressions of justice/punishment), monetary gain, transient irrationality/emotionality, and/or severe mental illness. We are likely to be most at risk from those to whom we choose to be physically close.

Yes, there is a risk, a low risk, that strangers could harm us or that people whom we only remotely interact with could harm us. But when we consider the probabilities, being harmed by a mentally ill person is actually lower than being harmed by an intimate associate who is intoxicated.

[elocs]

5. Which is my point. The inference of the thread seems to be that the dangerous mentally ill

are potentially lurking everywhere, even our neighbors.

There should be universal care for all health issues, every one of them.

[HereSince1628]

6. I agree with you in wanting mental health tx for all that need it

What scares the crap out of me is that in these conservative times, as we harken back to our 19th century values, the treatment of the mentally ill is more than likely to be realized via a prison sentence. Moderately to severely mentally ill men are already more often incarcerated than assigned to treatment.

Americans just want these 'risky people' out of their daily lives and away from their tax dollars. The prisons have the majority of the beds because society sees prisons as a better investment than mental care.

[undergroundpanther]

8. You got that right!

I would add ,psychopaths,authoritarians,narcissists along with addicts/substance abusers...they are all dangerous,and I suspect are the causers of a lot of violence,including violence against the public.

One thing about sufferers of mental illness,they are more likely to be harmed by the above mentioned people & the public and the state.

BTW psychopathy/sociopathy is not a mental illness. But being around sociopaths authoritarians and substance abusers can make a person mentally ill!

“Some of the most disturbing realities are not that pathology exists but that so little public pathology education for the general public exists.”
Sandra L. Brown, M.A., CEO, The Institute

http://www.thedoctorwillseeyounow.com/content/stress/art1964.html

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/pathological-relationships/201008/60-million-people-in-the-us-negatively-affected-someone-elses

[area51]

10. +1

Conservatives are incapable of seeing the point that even if they "don't want to pay for other people's health care", other people's lack of access to health care can kill the rightwingers, from catching a treatable disease such as TB, as mentioned by another poster, to being harmed by people like Loughner. Also, they're incapable of seeing that the reason why hospitals charge so much money is to recoup the losses of money for treating those who are brought into the ER in a crisis because they couldn't afford medical treatment when the condition they had was treatable.