The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    Coming Up Front About Mental Illness

    By Orion on Fri, 01/11/2013 - 11:07pm |

    As mental illness comes back in to the national discourse given all the tragic shootings, it's worth noting how pervasive mental illness really is. Mental illness doesn't necessarily mean schizophrenia - where a person stops being tuned at all in to reality and starts to talk incessantly to themselves.

    The SSRI support group I help manage helped illustrate to me that mental illness is everywhere. People in the group include people employed in child support services as well as people employed by big time television networks. I've talked to many of them and the craziness shows it self pretty fast. Most of the time you are not talking about psycho killers but instead people with bi polar or OCD who categorically have their lives disrupted by unwanted outbursts and obsessions. Nevertheless, with children and jobs and good looks, you wouldn't think these people were mentally ill.

    It's tradition for most to pretend mental illness doesn't exist. Mental institutions are traditionally on the fringes - the normal people who set foot there are braving the winds of abnormality to "give back" to people who are hopelessly lost. Families with mentally ill family members often don't talk about it or don't know how to talk about it.

    That attitude may simply not be an option anymore. If most of these mass shootings are being carried out by individuals who suffer from mental illness, it is quite literally a societal problem that has to be faced. Coming up front about mental illness will be difficult because, as I noted earlier, it is much more common than we really care to admit.

    It might be a good idea to work on a sort of "mental health safety net." It is for the good of everyone in society that people who lose it do not take it out on other people. The police are obviously not always equipped for this. I'm not sure what that would look like but it would probably include some sort of program aimed at helping people respond to the presence of a disturbed individual as well as ways in which our communities as a whole can better include such individuals.

    Give me your thoughts.

    Comments

    We were all born to inmates in an insane asylum. Is it any wonder we're all crazy to some degree. There's a way to tell who the most crazy inmates are, they're usually the ones with the keys i.e. with all the power.

    All we can do is try to figure out how to get a bit saner ourselves, get by in an insane world and, hopefully, make it a bit saner with our actions.


    by ocean-kat on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 1:37am

    I maintain, and have for some time now, that our particularly dog-eat-dog brand of capitalism, where people are expendable, and where many of us don't know if we'll be working in the same job a year from now-- is creating a huge amount of stress and even a low level of general psychosis which regularly explodes in violence.

    If one looks at low level mass murders-- one to four or five people killed; these are often happening at the perpetrator's workplace. and often the perpetrator kills himself.

    Also look at the massive amount of self-medicating our people are doing, via both legal and illegal drugs. Pot, alcohol, abuse of opiods (which now kill around 15,000 per year), nicotine, etc.

    _Why_ so much self-medication? Nobody is looking at this.

    It would be worthwhile to look at a nation like Germany for example, where workers have more rights. Their approach to the "great recession" was totally different than ours. Millions of German workers were not fired/laid off from their jobs. Instead mot workers were kept on, doing maintenance work in factories, painting, etc. Some workers had their hours cut, but they were kept on.

    Germany also has, IMHO, a much better education/training/job internship system where early on students are put on firm path to a skilled trades type of position (factory worker, etc.) or professional services. Here in the U.S. we have 1,000's of people spending alot of money on college, getting a degree, then either not able to find a job in their chosen career, or finding out they don't like the work-- and end up doing something totally different ten years out of college.

    http://academic.cuesta.edu/intlang/german/education.html

     


    by demunchained on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 9:01am

    People who are in the throes of mental illness most often do not or will not recognize that there is a problem and that there are people willing and able to help them.  I do think we've come a long way in understanding how prevalent mental illness really is, and, as a society, we're much more forgiving of odd behavior.

    When I worked in the psych unit of a major teaching hospital in the mid to late 70s I was stunned by how many of the so-called caretakers had quirks and phobias of their own.  From psychiatrists on down to residents and interns.  A whole bunch of them were just nuts.  (Not so you'd notice on first glance, but on getting to know them it became clear why they went into that profession.  They knew it well.)

    When our daughter went through a horrendous mental crash a few years ago I knew what to look for when choosing her care and I found it in a most unlikely place:  In a backwater mental health facility not connected to any big hospital, but dedicated to caring without fear of funding or red tape.  After several hospital stays with no relief down in the big city, we finally found a place that could actually help her.  She had exhausted her mental health insurance, but it was never an issue there.  The care they gave her was amazing. They diagnosed her problem accurately and started her on psychotropic drugs that instantly stopped the voices in her head and got her on her way back to sanity.  She still has some wobbly moments but we can all look back on that time now and wonder what would have happened if we hadn't found those angels up there in the north woods.

    We've come a long way but we still need to work on making mental health care as important as physical health care.  Depression is physical and is the root cause for so much mental illness.  There was a billboard in Detroit for a while that said something like, "You wouldn't tell a cancer patient to 'just get over it.' Depression is a real illness."

    There was a time when the word "cancer" was barely spoken out loud and cancer was an inevitable death sentence.  So much has changed since then, and we could do the same with mental illnesses.  It takes an open awareness of the problems and a concerted effort to get the medical and scientific communities to work as hard on recognition and cures and they did for cancer.  As with everything, it can be done.  The question is, how long before we take it that seriously?


    by Ramona on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 9:04am

    "When I worked in the psych unit of a major teaching hospital in the mid to late 70s I was stunned by how many of the so-called caretakers had quirks and phobias of their own.  From psychiatrists on down to residents and interns.  A whole bunch of them were just nuts."

    At the psych clinic that helped rehabilitate me in to normal Orion, that was definitely the case. One of the clients started hitting on this really attractive woman who works there and she exploded, "Excuse me? I have a weapon in my hand!" She had a hammer she was nailing things in to.

    A guy working at the front desk thanks to a temp agency also came in with a huge red mark on his forehead. He said, "Oh don't worry, it's just an abrasion!" It seemed like everyone there was insane.

    And if you were to broaden being crazy out to wanting to harm yourself, apparently everyone has been in that category at some time. Everyone in the Rat Pack had apparent suicide attempts and Drew Carey attempted twice.

    As for what was said earlier, it's not just capitalism but money itself that brings this out in people. My uncle in Guam was one of the nicest guys I had ever met. Whenever money came up, however, he became ruthless and I don't even think he even liked being like that either. You heard about horrific stuff in the Soviet Union and communist countries - socialism just made money in shorter supply but it was still as powerful.


    by Orion on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 9:31pm

    it's worth noting how pervasive mental illness really is.

    These can be dangerous words.

    These stories about "fans of James Holmes" that I read the other day:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2260580/Aurora-massacre-Woman-te...

    http://www.businessinsider.com/misty-benjamin-loves-james-holmes-2013-1

    are good examples to use to illustrate what I am referring to.

    Are people like this mentally ill? The more important question: should the relatives of people like this be allowed to force them into treatment? No, not a danger to society? How do you know for sure?

    Famously in some past totalitarian states, people who thought counter to important societal norms in this manner could be subjected to forced mental treatment. Despite some propaganda from the victims of this method of running society, usually the thinking behind it was "for the good of society," not "put our enemies in mental institutions." The theory behind it had good intent.

    Who decides what is dangerous mental illness?

    Especially when the "experts" often still can't  even define what it is?

    It's a no brainer when the person is asking for help and not getting it. But that's not the case with most of the problem you are worried about.


    by artappraiser on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 4:51pm

    Who decides what is dangerous mental illness?

    That is a question no one really has the answer to. There are people in the mental health system who are really out to lunch and obviously so. However, they may have been like that for years. Certainly they would seem more obviously threatening than a person like James Holmes, who had all sorts of academic accomplishments going on years.


    by Orion on Wed, 01/16/2013 - 1:32pm

    There is a good short article on that problem in today's Health Section of the NYT, you might find an item or two in there of use to quote, or learn something you didn't know

    One thing I learned that I didn't know is in there was that our judgment is skewed, because of recent examples, about how many of rampage or serial killings have been by mentally ill, when in fact they are not anywhere near the ovewhelming percentage of perps. One guy that's studied them says it's only 20% (which admittedly is higher percentage then them being involved in other crimes) and “But most mass murders are done by working-class men who’ve been jilted, fired, or otherwise humiliated — and who then undergo a crisis of rage and get out one of the 300 million guns in our country and do their thing,” Dr. Stone said. So all this effort into targeting mentally ill not getting access to guns isn't going to get much bang for the buck, as it were--required anger management classes for hotheads or taking away guns from those with restraining orders and the like would be much more fruitful. Especially because, mho, our capability in treating mental illness (and I'm talking worldwide, not just the US) is the shits.. Like I said before and will say again: psychiatry and all related sciences of the human mind are in their pitiful infancy...


    by artappraiser on Wed, 01/16/2013 - 2:20pm

    Wow,Orion. 

    You  keep producing must- read posts like this. 

    I won't comment because I mistrust my own position and don't want to possibly influence others to share it.  


    by Flavius on Mon, 01/14/2013 - 9:31am

    Thank you. I like to think the hell I went through has made me more resilient. The dark place my brain went in to was really scary and I don't ever - ever - want to feel like that again. laugh


    by Orion on Tue, 01/15/2013 - 9:35am