The Chatter About Yesterday's Murders

I'm not going to get into the gun discussion, but there is also a great deal of talk about mental health intervention, much of it quite naive, IMO. In each case, the recommendations sound good on the surface, but then there are realities that are unknown to people who don't have a great deal of experience with the mental health system. There are many devils in the details. Moreover, the level of public faith in our ability to predict violence is excessive, this coming from someone who has extensive training and experience in in-depth psych evaluation.

Furthermore, when the immediate hand-wringing is done, I doubt there would be wide public for support the costly trade-offs that might reduce the number of mass murders and spree killings. Major financial costs as well as social costs would be involved. And in addition to the more apparent costs, there are less visible secondary costs of many of the proposals. It's one thing to casually agree to these costs up front, but accepting them is quite another matter when the agitated chickens come home to roost.

After following a long thread at one of my daily reads (Eric Zorn), I added my three cents to the discussion. If you're interested, here's a link to my comment.

Comments

[Cheryl Fuller]

There is also the problem of the link between SSRIs and violent behavior when taken by males. A fair number of these school shooters have been on these meds.

[NMissC]

Asking the mental health system to help identify mass murderers in advance sounds perfectly simple in exactly the same way that building a manned space launch as a back yard project sounds perfectly simple: Both are very easy to say. Harder to do. The manned space launch project has the merit at least of being theoretically possible. After all, manned space launches have been done.

[Dr X]

Cheryl,

Yes. I didn't think of that.

NMC,

Good analogy. And sort of related, your analogy reminded me of statements I used to hear that began with: if we can put a man on the moon, we can... Well it turns out there are a lot of everyday problems that are more challenging than putting a man on the moon.

[Ruth]

The moon, like WW ll, was an effort that required our best and brightest, with the fullest commitment of government and the media. With such an effort, nothing in society, it seems to me, would be unsolvable.

So much for that. How about this? What if every person, in order to attain a gun license, had to undergo a psych evaluation? And have a follow-up every six months (or three months, once a month). And would require another test every time they wanted to buy a new gun?

Not helpful with illegally acquired guns, but I'm thinking this sort of mental health regimen would in the long run benefit society a lot. Think of the people who might learn better ways to deal with their problems than to take comfort in guns. It would require single-payer health care to pay for all this, of course, which would also be a win-win.

[Julie]

If Adam had Asperger's syndrome, there's very little that can be done from a mental health standpoint. Behavior modification might work to contain and channel inappropriate behavior but Asperger's isn't a mental illness.

(just a retired RN's opinion)

[Ruth]

I'm very ill at ease with all this discussion in the news of Asperger's being a possible cause of this terrible event. Aspie's are the last people I would think capable of such acts, and if they get tarred with this, it's going to make their difficult lives even worse.

Depression or other negative feelings as a result of the syndrome are common, so it's said, so maybe that was part of it. But really, no matter what his deal was, he lived in a house full of guns--his mother's guns. I think that kind of environment is far more to blame than an ASD, and I hope the focus can stay on that.