dagblog - Comments for "Eery Stuff In Seattle"

I have held my tongue (or

CVille Dem — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 22:30:01 +0000

In reply to I've been writing about this

I have held my tongue (or typing finger) as long as I can. You write about helping the mentally ill in your comments about these shootings, but you then refer to the shooters as "freaks" and "losers," over and over again.

I really don't think it is helpful to call the same people you say need to be involuntarily committed because of mental illness these names. Yes, what they've done is horrific, and they were horrible to do it, but your ability to analyze the situation suffers a credibility gap with me when you use these terms.

Alot of terrorist groups in

Orion — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 17:56:09 +0000

In reply to Your last line made me think

Alot of terrorist groups in the Middle East were also known to hire people to do deliveries, not revealing that they were militants at all, and detonating car bombs while a delivery was being made near a marketplace, mosque or other crowded area. That's way more methodical and destructive than these shootings.

Your last line made me think

Elusive Trope — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 17:32:46 +0000

In reply to I've been writing about this

Your last line made me think of the Nigerian rebel group Boko Haram, whose leader seems to be not only as pathological one can get, but also seeking his moment in the spotlight, which he has received in abundance. Of course, how many of the leaders of various countries throughout the globle were down right insane, leaving carnage, death and suffering in their wake - all of them, to some degree, were seeking to achieve greater and greater fame and adoration from as many as possible.

Reality television, and even those game shows that have been a staple of television, demonstrate the lust for notoriety, to be recognized above the crowd. We seem to be like the people of Whoville, screaming "we are here! we are here!" as if it were as in was in the Dr. Seuss book a matter of life and death.

The issue of pharmaceutical intervention to deal with the complex issues of the "mind" is a complicated one, as someone personally who is currently taking some rather serious medication to alter mood and anxiety.

I've been writing about this

Orion — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 16:52:00 +0000

In reply to For a couple of years during

I've been writing about this subject regularly since 2011 now and I've pissed alot of people off, including here, in what has been effectively thinking out loud about the topic. There are three things that I think changed radically in just the last few decades that I think explain this:

1) The destruction of large mental institutions and leaving the mentally ill to homelessness, psychiatric clinics and social services - that started in the 1980s and large scale shootings became more and more regular starting from there.

2) Large scale drugging - there used to regulations on advertising powerful pharmaceuticals. Those were gotten rid of in the late 1990s and we have now reached a point where mood altering drugs with warnings of suicidal and homicidal ideation are advertised in grocery stores - I literally saw a "Try it now!" type of ad for Effexor XR while I was at Safeway with Jennifer. Psychiatric drugs may have their place for some but they should obviously not be doled out like that.

3) Deregulation of firearms.

Add that in with an economy going south and this country losing its place in the world and it shouldn't come as a shock that we are seeing this. Also, from what you posted, it seems that this loser knew that he would finally be famous and recognized by society if he killed a whole bunch of people than if he just carried on with life normally. We all know that the media exalts these killers and I certainly hope the SPU hero, Jon Meis, becomes a household name instead of this freak.

I suppose also that it's fortunate that we are dealing with crazy people and not organized criminals who could inflict more large scale damage.

For a couple of years during

Elusive Trope — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 18:48:32 +0000

In reply to Eery Stuff In Seattle

For a couple of years during high school I lived just up the hill from the campus and, yes, it is hard to imagine such a tragedy occurring on this particular campus. Yet from one news report:

In 2010, [he] called 911 to report "a rage inside him" and said he wanted to hurt himself and others, according to a police report of the incident.

Two years later, officers responded again — this time finding him lying in the middle of the street in front of his suburban Mountlake Terrace home, ranting drunkenly for a SWAT team "to get him and make him famous."

In both of the earlier contacts with police, officers committed [him] involuntarily to Swedish Hospital in Edmonds for mental evaluations. [Public defender Ramona] Brandes said he has a long history of mental health problems for which he had been treated and medicated.

Is this a case of the mental health system simply failing? The budget increases to allow all the people such as the shooter to be monitored and evaluated by a case manger to ensure compliance with a treatment plan, or whether the treatment plan was being effective would have to increase more than a few percentage points.

Back in the early 90s when I was in the mental health field in Seattle, those case managers who had clients living out in the community commonly had 35 or more clients on their case load. That meant even if they met one client a day working seven days a week, they couldn't see all of them at least once a month. And a lot of these clients were homeless, taking days to individually track down. I'm sure the budget is much worse these days.

In many ways this is the same dilemma that faces educators when looking just at the problem of class size, where teachers are given over 30 students per class when just about every study will same the optimum level is around 15 to 20.

Of course, one of the key components in both of these is an increase in tax revenues to pay for system (aside from such issues as the quality of case managers or teachers, etc.)