New Found Interest in Mental Illness

In the September 10th Los Angeles Times, staff writer Mary Healy addressed the increasing concern and fear of mental illness in the U.S. population because of the improper linking of mass shootings and other mass homicidal attacks to mental illness in the perpetrator. She indicates past and ongoing research that indicates racial, gender, religious bias, and employment grievance as the major factors in mass killings. Her indication is that mental illness as a causative or proximate association of mass murder is only 4% of the violence, therefore leaving 96% of the episodes attributable to the other named associations.

Why then the trumpeting? Apparently, our prominent political figures in close consultation with the NRA are rallying behind "Guns don't kill people, the people behind the guns do and they are not people like us"...good guys with guns. There are not enough criminals with motivation for mass murder since there is no profit in it, and proper criminals subscribe to the profit motive like all of us (good Americans).

So, lets blame the mentally ill and recommend rehousing them as we did prior to the 1970's. As well as the inception of the Community Mental Health Centers Act which set out to provide comprehensive community based care through 5 basic services under the banner "mental illness is like any other illness." Of course, this is untrue and comprehensive care was expensive and the good old state hospitals with the powerful Association of State Hospital Superintendents were left in limbo. When the out of power party discovered that CMHCs and community organizers were capable of creating an enduring political hegemony, the act was repealed.

Federal support for the state hospital systems had been strangled, existing CMHCs were eating up state resources, and jails, prisons and local streets were taking up and of course mishandling the problem now generically named homelessness. Some 40% of the homeless population are seriously mentally ill. When you add addiction and situational maladjustment with depressive symptoms the figure approaches 60%. 

The politicians including the President who are calling for warehousing of the mentally ill instead of gun control are blaming their past counterparts for the destruction of the state hospital system erroneously. Blaming mass violence on the mentally ill erroneously, and deliberately avoiding manageable issues like gun registration, outlawing of automatic and semi automatic weapons. 

On a more positive note, suicidal risk depressive patients experience depressive symptom reduction with the addition of esketamine nasal spray according to two phase 3 trials presented at Psych Congress 2019.