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Fox
News
OPINION: The Issue Is Too Little
Mental Health Care
Dec
17, 2012
Adam
Lanza, 20, who killed 20 children and 6 adults on Friday, has
brought incalculable grief to dozens of families and stunned our
nation.
Now,
the debate begins about what to do in the wake of his carnage
in Newtown, Connecticut and the multiple murders in Aurora, Colorado
and at
Columbine High School, the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota and
the
West Nickel Mines School in Pennsylvania, Virginia Tech and Chardon
High School
in Ohio.
Some
will say that gun control is the answer, but that ignores the
obvious: Too many
guns isn't the issue;
too little mental health care is.
Focusing
on gun control does more than squander the time and
effort of our public officials and state resources and town police
forces, it
distracts us dangerously from the real work that must be done.
America's
mental health care system is shattered and on its knees.
After
decades of deconstructing our inpatient psychiatric
hospitals and community mental health centers and after decades of
insurance
companies demanding that they pay only for
social workers and nurses to treat even
the most extremely mentally ill
and potentially violent individuals (rather than including
psychologists and
psychiatrists) we now have a mental health care system that simply
ignores
those among us who suffer with incapacitating symptoms of psychiatric
illness
and whose suffering canonly in a very, very small percentage of cases,
thankfullylead
to terrible violence.
What
is wrong, exactly?
Here
is the truth: Today,
even a mentally ill young man with a known propensity for violence, or
even a
history of serious violence, is likely to receive just an hour a week
of
counseling (if that) by a social worker.
He
is likely have an unclear diagnosis of his condition and to be
on a list of constantly changing, very powerful psychoactive
medications
prescribed by a nurse.
He
is also likely to be turned away -- repeatedly --by emergency room
social workers who act as gatekeepers for insurance companies to
restrict
access to inpatient psychiatric treatment.
If
admitted to a psychiatric hospital, he will likely be triaged
quickly through an often-incompetent "tune up" of medications that
might accomplish nothing and then be sent back home as soon as he
"contracts for safety"simply promising a social worker that he won't
kill anyone.
Read
the rest of the article at Foxnews
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