It’s a very important subject. Does anyone remember the NIU gunman?

I do. He lied to the U.S. Army, was discovered during basic training, and dishonorably discharged.

——————>
He graduated from Elk Grove High School in 1998, during which he was treated temporarily for mental illness at the Elk Grove Village Thresholds-Mary Hill House psychiatric center,[34] for being “unruly” at home, according to his parents. He later went on to study sociology at Northern Illinois University (NIU). Though his family moved to Florida in 2004, Kazmierczak continued his education in Illinois.[35][36] He enlisted in the United States Army in September 2001, and was discharged before completing basic training in February 2002 for lying on his application about his mental illness.[37][38]

Kazmierczak graduated from NIU in 2006[35] where he received the Dean’s award in 2006 and was considered a stand-out, well-regarded student.[35] Campus police describe him as a “fairly normal” and “unstressed person.”[42] Faculty, students, and staff “revered” him and there was no indication of any trouble.[43] NIU President John G. Peters said that he had “a very good academic record, no record of trouble.”[36] Kazmierczak was Vice-President of the NIU chapter of the American Correctional Association; he had also written about the U.S. correctional system, specifically prisons.[44]
<————–

But read the rest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Illinois_University_shooting

He is believed to have studied the UVA shooting by Cho to plan his actions.

Incidentally, although it's inpossible to say anything about whether it was related to his crimes, he was festooned with tattoos based on the movie "The Saw" – starring Danny Glover among others. He also had other Satanic tattoos on his arms. Apparently he fit right in at the NIU Sociology department as a "stand out, well-regarded student". The day of that shooting, their home page had a scrolling banner across the top: "Marx….Weber….Durkheim….." I've still got a screenshot of it somewhere…

http://www.newser.com/story/19272/niu-shooter-delved-into-satanism.html

As a further consideration, Baltimore reports that about 90% of its homicide victims have a criminal record. That number in the District of Columbia is about 75%. I should not be surprised to find a strong correlation between both the criminal activity and mental illness among both the victim and shooter populations.

Assume for the sake of argument you could prove a strong link between those who have mental illness(do you want to include addiction as a mental illness)

What do you do then? Do you pass a law requiring those incarcerated to pass a government mental health test before they are released?

A) Are you comfortable with giving the government that power over you?

B) Do you think the government in times of budget stress will game the system either by lowering the release standards or by pumping the mentally ill full of drugs so they can pass the government psyche test and then lose them on the street?

I’m honestly interested in your perspective.

A friend of mine had a brother with schizophrenia who refused to take his meds. My friend and his family tried for years to get him help with limited success. They tried to have him committed but couldn’t.
There only hope was to have him arrested and sent to jail which they did in several occasions but it was always a short term “solution”.

Liberals go after guns rather than mental health because to do something about mental health would be to admit failure of their policies that deinstitutionalized the mentally ill during one of their social justice crusades.

Liberalism is driven primarily by emotion. They reject reason and fact if those clash with how they feel about an issue.

By the way I read yesterday’s op-ed in the New York Times by Paul Steinberg. I support a lot of what he says there. I’m not so keen on the “It takes a village” catchphrases and things like that, but I think it’s a very important conversation to have. It is very much a part of what we’re seeing right now. Mental illness in America – particularly in its more severe manifestations – is a very, very difficult conversation to broach but along with everthing else, it is not something we can ignore.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/opinion/our-failed-approach-to-schizophrenia.html

I really want to applaud him for his courage, in particular his courage to do this:

“I write this despite the so-called Goldwater Rule, an ethical standard
the American Psychiatric Association adopted in the 1970s that directs
psychiatrists not to comment on someone’s mental state if they have not
examined him and gotten permission to discuss his case. It has had a
chilling effect.”

That’s not an easy thing for a psychiatrist to even consider doing and out of all the op-eds in the New York Times that I’ve ever read, Paul Steinberg’s on Christmas Day was one of the most courageous and I personally appreciate the dialogue he’s helped to move forward.

Everyone is afraid of talking about these problems because everyone is afraid of being blamed, or worse. But if we’re going to have better answers than we have now, and we’re going to have better results than we have now, we can’t keep doing the proverbial Sand Ostrich.

[Ostriches don't actually stuff their heads into the sand, but a lot of the time people do.]

Erick,
Thanks for the article. We do need to have the conversation on mental illness, but it is really hard for those who “care” to deal with people. They would prefer to deal with inanimate objects from guns to bombs to knives, to whatever else to avoid having to deal with the problem, which is the people who need support. It is also true that it cannot be a bureaucracy to take care of them; group homes vs. asylums vs. ObamaCare paying for meds that the people won’t take without someone encouraging them. The homeless problem is a manifestation of mental illness in my opinion.

I agree that we must care for our brothers. I don NOT agree that we need one dime of Federal funds to do so, however. There are groups of people banded together on the local level called local governments that are there to benefit for these sort of things if they are not being done by churches and other organizations.

Erick,

I like your experience-based approach here.

Far better, in my estimation, than writing Adam Lanza off as evil.

What he did was evil.

What Americans of all stripes need is to understand, as best as possible, what went on in his head. His head controlled his body. His body controlled the guns.

I agree with you completely. This is an excellent diary by EE and it highlights one of the real issues in this tragedy and others like it, which is mental health. A poster stated below that we have the same amount of inpatient hospital beds in the United States as we did in 1850. That is simply unbelievable and unacceptable.

It saddens me, but I do believe that the Left and their politicians does not want to talk about this because of the reason you mentioned (admitting that their policies of deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill has been a failure. Although to be fair I think even RR made a similar error). You can reform a system without tearing it down. I also think they choose to ignore this issue because it does not suit their agenda or bring them power. How sad that they would rather garner power than find a solution and actually better society!

We must keep this ( mental health) at the forefront and not back down. Hollywood has apparently joined the call or gun control, while conveniently ignoring that they share a large share of the blame for pushing violent media at every turn. The real issues that if addressed will bring real change cannot be swept aside due to politics.

I thought this was interesting from National Review (which I know isn’t popular here at Red State). Perhaps we could do a better job with the funding we have. We can’t assume that just because a cause receives funding that it means the funds are going to the appropriate use or being used in the correct way. I get your point. I just thought these were really good suggestions.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/335767/five-point-action-plan-president-obama-reduce-violence-mentally-ill-d-j-jaffe

Thank you. The Progressive’s constituents include a witches brew of competing interests and lost in this is the mental health end of the social services community. Far too many people are in the system due to serious and dangerous mental health issues. A friend of my wife used every opportunity to focus attention on the real danger of schizophrenia after seeing what happened to a co-worker dealing with “a well known and harmless client” who showed up one day with a different personality and no medication.

And medical professionals are scared of the tuberculosis strain that is incubating in the street people that get sick, stay only until their symptoms are under control then return to the street before the disease can be eliminated, Each time they arrive they need stronger doses of antibiotics simply to suppress the ravages of the disease if they work at all.

The thing we really need to talk about is controlling people who can’t be trusted with guns, or anything else dangerous.

We as a country and a party are not willing to pay for mental health care.

It is, by far, the most expensive care for the outcomes. You can easily drop thousands or tens of thousands of dollars into care, and receive no positive outcome. In fact, more often than not, it’s simply a black hole of money. The afflicted almost always have no private means to pay. They have no economic capacity to earn, and they have no family with economic capacity to earn. In a best case scenario they become marginally self-sufficient, or perhaps stable enough to live with family members for a while.

The only program that really pays for what care they can get is Medicare, which has been cut heavily to balance state budgets. Of course prison healthcare isn’t going to effectively treat the problem, but rather try to control the symptoms during incarceration.

Obamacare is the only expansion of mental health care funding to be passed into Federal law in a generation. The mechanism is the expansion of the Medicaid program, which as we know, the Supreme Court determined to be illegal to tie into the Obamacare legislation. This means only a handful of states will initially go forward with the expansion, including most likely none of the GOP controlled states. Redstate front page writers have posted repeatedly about how to cut Medicaid program. Virtually every current Republican governor has cut funding for this type of care, and just a few weeks ago the concept of paying psychiatrists that work for State Medicaid, Prison, or other indignant providers a fair wage for the hours they work was pilloried here and elsewhere around the internet. In Virgina, for example, their governor is proposing more cuts to Medicaid that would directly affect service levels for the mentally ill.

It is perfectly well to have happy warm thoughts about fixing mental healthcare and delivery, it is entirely another thing to actually solve the problem with policy changes. But the facts are the facts, and they are that this problem has no free market solution. There is zero free market case for treating these people.

Erick, this is a flat out challenge. What policies would you suggest we enact, as a party and a country, to solve this challenge? Do you have anything concrete at all to move forward on?

This is a horribly un-conservative set of recommendations that equates to:

1. Lower the standard to allow a court to hold you without charges, based on a nebulous medical condition that may not even be treatable. The entire concept is inherently unconstitutional.

2. Unfunded mandates by the Federal government to require states to treat (and pay for) certain medical conditions. If we believe the ACA/Obamacare is unconstitutional, how can this be constitutional?

3. Treat “children” (i.e. adult children) like actual children. This is ridiculous, and would not likely survive constitutional muster as it’s flat our discrimination based on mental health status.

> What he did was evil.

Easy to say “evil”, but one thing that’s hard to say if we will ever know is did he have the requisite intent to do evil. If he was actually suffering a mental break, we’ll never know.

This comment is absurd and reflects your complete ignorance re: mental health patients. You speak as though you think the only patients who are “criminal patients” (whatever that is) are the poor. There is no separation in the mental health field between the kinds of clientele who may have a criminal record and those who don’t. In fact, it is very common for patients to be court ordered into treatment and that is the only reason they walk into a psychiatrist’s office to begin with. Many of the so-called “criminal patients” have private insurance coverage to pay for their treatment. So, I am not sure what you are trying to say by this comment. You are feeding into the stigma that surrounds mental illness by making such absurd, crude comments.

I am closely related to a practicing psychiatrist, and I speak from many years of experience.

Clients that Erick mention – people who are incarcerated or are in diversion – are not going to open the yellow pages and get a psychiatrist who works downtown seeing private patients. The concept is flatly absurd.

Virtually 100% of the care is delivered by psychiatrists who work exclusively with criminal or incarcerated patients, or at very most, have a split practice.

By the time they have a criminal record, it is laughable that they have private insurance coverage, and even if they do, most private coverage has basically garbage coverage for mental health, with very low limits on what is actually available, and high out of pocket costs. That is why, in effect, anyone with long-term mental illness is on Medicaid if they can get it. They can’t hold down a job, and even if they did, their insurance wouldn’t cover treatment. Since mental health is not a protected status, any prolonged or performance/attendance problem leads to termination. Within a few months of a serious mental problem, most patients are indigent, even those with substantial savings and/or family resources.

There is a strong correlation between being mentally ill and being criminally convicted, and being poor. The more well off simply don’t get convicted. They have the resources to push prosecutors into diversion, and an eventual filing of the case. They avoid the criminal justice system, and stay out of the prison, court-ordered, or Medicaid mental health systems. This is exactly what Erick’s post is about.

On top of addiction, she had mental health issues that took far too
long to diagnose only have the patient refuse much treatment. The drugs they wanted her to take didn’t do for her, in her mind, what the other drugs did. The mental disorder had more to do with her problems than anything else, but it was treated as the ancillary issue.
Her drug habit caused her to descend to crime to pay for the habit.

This is pretty clear, and I agree with it. Once criminal it is a clear, complete delineation from the private world of mental health. They almost always become immediately destitute. You imagine there is some method for incarcerated inmates with mental problems to stay solvent?

You are deeply out of touch. Open up the yellow pages, see who is advertising for psychiatry. These are not people whose practices are open to diversion or court-ordered patients. These are people in private practice, who are not going to be seeing those with serious mental health issues, and who are incarcerated. Their care is completely and totally provided for by the state – by the prison system, by the court system, or Medicaid.

Try getting a clue. The “yellow pages” method that I am responding to is completely irrelevant to mental health issues.

I would guess that is done a lot, huh? I thought sure that you were going to argue about a rampage from PA that might occur in OH. Maybe that is a good approach for illegal aliens? I guess that we also do that with our garbage, right?

I would guess then that Medicare goes back into the 1900′s, because virtually all states ran their own asylum systems. Ever read “The Snake Pit”? They were how local areas handled this.

As far as paying for it, we still pay a part of our property taxes in Ohio for MRDD as a levy (this is Mental Retardation and Developmentally Disabled). There is likely a Federal component, to that also because it seems to make the dollars go farther if you take them from Ohio taxpayers, take them to Washington through the Federal tax system, send them through HHS bureaucracy to administer them, and then send them back to Ohio to take care of a local problem makes so much sense to me.

Go bother someone else.

People tend to go to the Federal government to fund things for several reasons: the funding is looked at as perpetual and increasing, the representatives are constantly looking for ways to give out money, and because it is easier than dealing with “50 states”. Same reason the libs constantly go to the Federal courts to try to get their cause celebre funded.

Unfortunately, the reality is that this is poorly done at the Federal level and not even much better done at the state level. It is a local problem, and one that can be funded locally if you can get the Federal government to stop taking an increasingly large amount of funds. I am so looking forward to what President Obama does to mandate mental health treatment. It will be so wonderful (sarcasm intended).

Again, you are living in lala land. The private sector clientele has just as many “serious mental health issues” as the public sector clientele. There is no magic wand that makes the poor’s mental health issues different from those who are not poor. Have you paid attention to the details of the lifestyle of the latest mass shooting perpetrator — Adam Lanza? His mother lived in a mansion and was receiving nearly a quarter million dollars a year from her divorce settlement. Socio-economic levels have nothing to do with who has mental illness and whether or not they engage in criminal activities. Yes, those with the financial means to hire a private attorney may be able to skirt the system and hide their deeds but the nature of their problems is the same as any poor person. You are very uninformed and it shows.

There is no upper class mental health diagnoses. Mental health diseases strike across the board and have no respect for the living standards of those who they inflict. Again, you need to stop trying to draw a line of difference between private sector patients and public sector patients. Those in the private sector may very well have criminal histories — you just do not know about it.

“It is, by far, the most expensive care for the outcomes. You can easily
drop thousands or tens of thousands of dollars into care, and receive
no positive outcome. In fact, more often than not, it’s simply a black
hole of money. The afflicted almost always have no private means to
pay. They have no economic capacity to earn, and they have no family
with economic capacity to earn. In a best case scenario they become
marginally self-sufficient, or perhaps stable enough to live with family
members for a while.”

You are a heartless, misinformed scrooge and comments such as this is one of the reasons conservatives earn the reputation as uncaring. I suggest you stop making these outrageous, bigoted comments. All you are doing is reinforcing the stigma surrounding mental health and making yourself look like a fool.

It’s been going on a long time. It ended.

WCP, this person is a moby and has no idea what he/she is talking about. Upthread, he/she claimed that a law that cut Medicaid in his/her state for single people over 19 included people with disabilities. This would be in clear violation of federal law, since Medicaid was designed in part for people with disabilities and not based solely on poverty. There is a list of qualifying disabilities for Medicaid. A state could not “cut” anyone that had a qualifying disability.

This person has no clue about the health care system and/or disability law (there are other additional funding sources for people with disabilities other than Medicaid, but I would bet this individual does not know this).

What you write is true. Actions of do-gooders such as the ACLU has made it nearly impossible to help people with mental conditions. Thus they are put out into the street.