@hingehead,
Quote:...suicide, particularly by gun is all to often triggered by depression and guns in particular make spur of the moment '**** it I'll end it' decisions all too simple to act on when the slightest intervention of a friend or love one could prevent the motivation, or it least introduce doubt - depression is a treatable illness.
That's why addressing mental health services should be one aspect of dealing with our country's problem with gun violence--it will benefit the treatment of depression that leads to suicides by gun. Those suicides make a substantial contribution to our current gun death statistics, and depression is a treatable illness.
All too often, depression is now treated by family doctors who give a patient a prescription for an anti-depressant and don't do much more beyond that. But research clearly indicates that is not the most effective treatment, although for insurers it may be the most cost-effective. The most effective treatment is a combination of therapy and medication, something that requires a referral to a mental health professional, and our health care policies have to make sure that such therapeutic treatment for depression is available to all who need it and that referrals to specialists become the norm. Because that would also be the best suicide prevention measure, that is what we should demand that insurers provide.
I don't think enhanced mental health services would do much at all in terms of trying to prevent mass shootings. The notion that these people can be identified in advance, and civilly locked up in psychiatric facilities to prevent them from going on rampages, is largely an illusion. The ability of even experienced mental health professionals to predict "dangerousness" of that sort is poor. And several of the mass shooters were either in psychiatric treatment, or had had prior contacts with mental health professionals, and there is no indication that any of them lacked access to mental health treatment or lacked the means to pay for it, had they sought it out. The Fort Hood shooter was himself a psychiatrist. And because these people were all "law-abiding" citizens prior to their massacres, and were not acting in a clearly dangerous way prior to those massacres, or voicing specific threats of violence prior to their massacres, the justification for locking any of them up in a mental hospital would have been almost nil.
The one clear sign that would have been the biggest red flag for all of the mass shooters would have been their easy access to the firearms and ammunition they used, and, for most of them, their attempts to obtain even more firearms, or more ammunition, prior to carrying out their rampages. Perhaps we need to limit the quantities of ammunition, or weapons, that can be purchased within a certain period of time, or perhaps we need to better scrutinize or track the buyers, by having a data base that tracks large ammunition purchases, or tracks multiple weapons acquisition. James Holmes, the Aurora theater shooter, purchased almost 7000 rounds of ammunition in a two-month period--along with all of his weapons during the same period--and that sort of buying pattern should not go unnoticed, it should raise an alert.
So, while the calls for better mental health services are coming in the wake of mass shootings, and are prompted by indications that many of the shooters had some serious mental health problems, enhancing these services will likely not be very effective, at all, in preventing future mass shootings. Enhanced gun controls and regulations might do a lot more to help prevent mass shootings.
