Past time for a national conversation on mental illness

I actually heard about this one over the weekend, and thought I'd share. It's past time for this national conversation, don't you think?

Breitbart: In a moving piece titled “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” a divorced mother of four, Liza Long, writes of her 13-year-old highly intelligent son, “Michael,” who vacillates from violent acts such as threatening his mother and himself with a knife after she asked him to return his library books to enjoying his snuggle animal collection and discussing Einstein’s physics.

The day of the knife incident, Long writes, after Michael’s 9- and 7-year-old siblings fled to the car and locked the door, three policemen and a paramedic were needed to force him onto a gurney to travel to the local emergency room, because the mental hospital didn’t have beds that day.

His mother writes that there have been numerous attempts to diagnose Michael, labeling him as a victim of autism spectrum, ADHD, or Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder; many different antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals have been tried, but none of them work.

Michael’s mother, who is an author and musician, halted her career so she could take a position with a local college simply to get health insurance. As she writes: “You'll do anything for benefits. No individual insurance plan will cover this kind of thing.”

Long writes,

In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it's easy to talk about guns. But it's time to talk about mental illness. According to Mother Jones, since 1982, 61 mass murders involving firearms have occurred throughout the country. Of these, 43 of the killers were white males, and only one was a woman. Mother Jones focused on whether the killers obtained their guns legally (most did). But this highly visible sign of mental illness should lead us to consider how many people in the U.S. live in fear, like I do.

The only option left, one social worker told Long, was to get Michael charged with a crime and thrown into prison. She notes that prisons like Rikers Island, the LA County Jail and Cook County Jail in Illinois have the biggest treatment centers for the mentally-ill in the country.

Long concludes:

I agree that something must be done. It's time for a meaningful, nation-wide conversation about mental health. That's the only way our nation can ever truly heal.

God help me. God help Michael. God help us all.

Unfortunately, with the leadership we currently have in D.C., it's quite unlikely that they'd actually address this problem appropriately.

ADDENDUM I: Here's an interesting accompanying discussion with Rush this morning as he talked with one caller who happened to be a psychiatrist. She elaborated on the difficulties of getting many of the mentally ill committed to the appropriate hospitals due to today's patient rights.

"...it sounds like what we need is lunatic control, and we don't have any."

Rush also read an email from another listener who theorized that because most of these mentally disturbed killers are young, white males from above-average families, which Liza Long pointed out as well, perhaps some aspects of their mental illness derive from today's societal malnourishment, displacement, and in some cases abandonment, of this demographic (i.e., what it means to be a young, white man...and not made to feel 'guilty' about everything). Something to think about.

ADDENDUM II: John Fund at NRO also wrote an interesting piece worth consideration: 'It’s time to address mental health and gun-free zones.'