When the gun lobby breaks from denouncing Hollywood and videogames as motivators for attacks like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School, they ultimately circle back to “addressing mental health.” Though the lobby itself rarely divulges what this means and who will pay for it (their answer: no one), the terms of this proposed aid are worth discussion.For the gun lobby and its supporters, “addressing mental health” does not mean helping many of our mentally ill. Civil commitment — involuntary inpatient care in a hospital or institution — is the gun lobby’s focus. Specifically, they argue that we commit too few because it’s too hard, leaving us with an alleged legion of psychotic killers hunting the unarmed gates of our schools. If committing people were simpler, the army would vanish and the funerals would cease.
No reasonable analysis leaves this hypothesis intact. In 2010, according to the Brady Campaign, 11,078 homicides were committed with firearms. From 2010 to 2012, a New York University study puts the total number — adults and students combined — of gun murders in K-12 schools at 38. By itself, Sandy Hook increased the past three years’ death toll by more than 200 percent.
There is no army of crazed killers, meaning there’s no reason to increase the amount of treatment to confined men and women to prevent these infrequent atrocities. Our own Secret Service found one link between mental illness and school shootings: deep depression.
Of course, the depressed rarely require the inpatient care our gun lobby believes will heal our nation, but instead need more state-funded mental health workers in schools coupled with an increase in mandated insurance coverage for both adult and childhood psychiatric care.
The Northwest is no stranger to the rare confluence of mental health disorders and gun violence. On August 22, 2011, my friend Katy Benoit was shot 11 times by a former University of Idaho assistant professor who was taking medication for bi-polar disorder.
After the shooting, all reports described a man with a slowly unwinding condition, culminating in his murder-suicide. Some people do require civil commitment, and if anyone were a qualifying candidate, Ernesto Bustamante was it.
Except Bustamante was taking medication at the time of the shooting. Reports also indicate he had previously sought mental health treatment. Would simpler civil commitment be driving people like this to psychiatrists, knowing their confinement was a phone call or two away? I say no.
Our mentally ill with the capacity to seek help have the same capacity to forego it, and the barrier of stigma already stops too many Americans from seeking the psychiatric care they need.
We don’t need to give those predisposed to paranoia additional barricades, including fear. The mentally ill will not find the requisite solace for rehabilitation in psychiatry if their therapist doubles as judge and jury of their own forced confinement.
Brian Marceau can be reachedat [email protected]