Happy Halloween From "The Dangerous Mentally Ill"!

Well, hello there! I am a member of that infamous tribe, "the dangerous mentally ill." The one politicians have been beating the drums about so often and so menacingly lately, leading up to the election. My heart skips a beat too when it booms out of my television. I'm a little scared, just like you. They sound pretty fucking alarming, "the dangerous mentally ill." 

Apparently they are buying guns in bulk, which they will use to kill senselessly, but that other politician has done nothing to stop them! He wouldn't even vote for criminal background checks to disqualify "the dangerous mentally ill" (who aren't technically criminals but hey, might as well be, right?) from owning guns! (And yes, there are so many guns in this country, it'd be easy for those mentally ill to get their dangerous little hands on them anyway. But, don't interrupt! We're trying to terrify the electorate here.) 

The phrase doesn't refer to a subgroup of "the mentally ill" anymore -- to that small group who are "dangerous" despite, um, never having posed a danger to anyone. (Let's see...They're dangerous because in hindsight, some killer or other was probably mentally ill, and someone should have noticed he was dangerous before he ever became dangerous, so that he wouldn't become dangerous....Wait, is that logical? .... Oh, logic doesn't matter? All rightey then.) Now it means everybody: All "the mentally ill" are "the dangerous mentally ill." They've all morphed into monsters overnight! That's how sneaky and insidious they are! Round them up: anyone you see going to a psychiatrist's office, or filling a prescription for one of those drugs they take, or talking to himself in public (but be sure he's not wearing earphones first). They're all coming to get us. We must be vigilant! 

But [SPOILER ALERT] guess what? They're just bogeymen. And like all good bogeymen, they're trotted out to scare and distract people -- so that politicians can do what they've always done: get themselves elected no matter what, by demonizing no matter who, so they can do nothing whatsoever about the things that are truly dangerous: unemployment, poverty, hunger, the disappearance of the middle class, climate disaster, lack of health care, women losing their rights to their own bodies...and, well, we could go on for quite a while. But it's easier to throw a sheet over thousands of human beings and yell BOO!! They're "the dangerous mentally ill!" Scared yet?

Mass Murder and the Mentally Ill: 60 Minutes Gets it Wrong

This psychcentral commentary summarizes my own opinion and perspective on gun violence and the mentally ill, an opinion shared by many professionals as well as people with a mental illness themselves, and ordinary people who want the truth. It does so by stating the facts as we know them, not speculations or lazy assumptions. The comment comes in response to a recent 60 Minutes piece which relied on loose correlations, unfounded assumptions and untested conclusions to call for some ill-advised measures to contain and "prevent" this kind of violence.

Ill-advised because based on little to no data. Ill-advised because no one can foresee the future. Ill-advised because they isolate and target a group of people who need and seek treatment -- making them more likely to forgo any treatment.

Suggesting we initiate mental health screening and vastly increase treatment access is all well and good -- but how would they be funded and carried out? There is no screening tool that can foresee the future of any individual -- how will we develop one? Increasing treatment is a sound goal, a desperately needed goal, but it would cost a fortune. Are we ready to pay for it?

60 Minutes, ignoring these hard questions, accomplished little more than demonizing the mentally ill, relying on "experts" like by Dr. E. Fuller Torey and his Treatment Advocacy Center, who  has been pushing for forced treatment of schizophrenics for years, claiming they pose a unique threat to society but failing to back it up with any scientific data.

And that's what we need. Scientific data and research on gun violence, mental illness, schizophrenia, and if it is possible to prevent horrible crimes before they are even conceived of. Scientific research, furthermore, on better treatments that would actually work and be more tolerable so that people would stay on them. As it is now, our first-line treatment -- drugs -- often carries with it such unpleasant and even debilitating side effects that it's little wonder so many give up on them.

But we won't get it, because it seems that when it comes to mental illness and gun violence, data is irrelevant. We go with the easy conclusion, out of fear of threats to our safety and well-being, however ill-founded and misdirected. We focus on identifying the very tiny needle that is the "dangerous mentally ill" in the vast haystack that is our population -- and that is ridiculous.

Targeting everyone with a severe mental illness, in particular schizophrenia, may make the public feel better, but it is a straw man that needs to be knocked down.

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/09/30/60-minutes-connecting-mental-illness-to-violence-with-little-data-facts/

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