This probably isn't what most of you here are looking for to bolster your position - but it is a facet of mental illness that must be taken into consideration in any discussion about mental illness and gun rights. Notice that in this and other similar stories on their website, guns are not blamed for these tragedies - untreated mental illness is. For more information, please visit the Treatment Advocacy Center website at
www.TreatmentAdvocacyCenter.org
PASADENA STAR NEWS (CA), February 29, 2008
HELP FOR THE MENTALLY ILL
LAST April 16 at Virginia Tech University, mentally ill student Seung-Hui Cho went on a shooting rampage killing 32 people and himself. This past Valentine's Day, Stephen Kazmierczak killed five people then himself inside a Northern Illinois University lecture hall not long after he stopped taking his medication. In Baldwin Park, a 28-year-old self-described mentally disturbed man shot and killed his mother and then walked into his neighbors' house and fatally shot two people inside, including a 4-year-old girl.
These and other rampage shootings are tied together by a common denominator: shooters who are mentally ill and refuse treatment or stop taking their medication.
Monday night's rampage in a quiet Baldwin Park neighborhood prompted longtime mental health advocate Dolores Encinas of West Covina to say in a letter to our newspapers: "These unnecessary killings have got to stop!" A similar incident in New York moved Dr. E. Fuller Torrey to write in an op-ed in the New York Post: "We know what to do, of course. Most individuals like (mentally ill shooter David Tarloff in New York) do very well if they are properly followed up and treated."
Torrey, president of the Treatment Advocacy Center and an expert on the country's mental health treatment issues, said every America shares in the blame for not demanding a mental health system that works. Until we hold "hospital and mental-health accountable ... each mind-numbing tragedy will keep on being followed by another," he wrote.
We know what to do. We just need the will to do it.
Because getting people the help they need, and the follow-up treatment to make sure they stay on their medication, takes money, coordination and can collide with civil rights.
I was the lead investigator on a clinical trial at Stanford involving insight and awareness of illness in persons with those serious mental illnesses that include acute psychotic symptoms.
Note that I am not talking here about persons with PTSD, anorexia, A.D.D, moderate depression, Ausberger's syndrome, etc, etc. I'm talking specifically about acute psychosis.
In addition, I am the father of a young (31) man with a serious mental illness. He is a loving, intelligent, talented, non-violent person. Within weeks of discontinuing his meds, he becomes acutely psychotic and delusional.
Because the onset of his illness was at the age of 15, he has never had a driver's license, and he has never attempted to obtain one. He has also never had a firearm, nor has he attempted to obtain one of those.
I think any gun owner with a mental illness who decides to take prescription medication needs to be on their guard to recognize dangerous thought processes and deal with them appropriately. Even if it means locking up the guns.
He is stable now, and has been for a couple of years. He could probably safely drive and own a firearm - when he is complying with treatment and stable.
But, like more than 50% of persons with psychotic illnesses, he has very little insight or awareness of his illness, because the organ that we use to asses ourselves is the very organ that is impaired - his brain.
The very nature of this imairment makes it impossible to "recognize dangerous thought processes and deal with them appropriately" - as so many here have suggested in one way or another. That inability is what serious mental illness is by definition.
As a result, he often stops taking his meds for one reason or another every couple of years. This may be because he convinces himself he isn't sick and doesn't need them (he does!) - or because he doesn't like the side-effects (and they do suck!).
Whatever the reason, the result is always the same: acute psychosis and paranoid delusions.
For these reasons, I don't think it would ever be safe to trust him with a driver's license, or a firearm. And there are many thousands of good people like him.