The Tucson Massacre, Stanford Prison Experiment, and Mental Illness.

This comes from an interesting site I just stumbled upon, called www.opposingviews.com. Check it out. I don't agree with every word in this piece, but there's a very well-written and compelling argument here about whether the problem with people like Loughner acting out violently in response to widely practiced hate speech is rooted in individuals' mental illnesses (like schizophrenia or manic-depression), or something deeper and far too "normal" in the way people are socialized...

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Should Medical Community Have Done More After Arizona Shootings?

News by The Doctor Weighs In


by Dov Michaeli

I have been watching the awful news from Arizona with a mixture of sadness and anger. This obscure (until last Saturday) representative from Tucson was gunned down while meeting with constituents. This brave woman was there performing her constitutional duties despite being targeted by the extremist nuts with threatening phone calls, with suggestive cross –hairs graphics, with vandalism against her office, with explicit threats to her life. The instinctive reaction throughout the country was revulsion at the political vitriol, the coarsening of our discourse, the ready resort, both rhetorically and physically, to violence.

And the punditry’s reaction?

From the right wing, Rush Limbaugh saw yet another  conspiracy by the Democrats to suppress free speech. From the centrist punditry, an admonition that no correlation has been shown between hate speech and physical violence. And from the medical community –a deafening silence. Presumably because there is no data to suggest that rhetoric can affect unstable minds. Or is it because we are simply cowed by the torrent of vitriolic contempt that is sure to be unleashed if we spoke up? Is there really no evidence to support the relationship between verbal and physical violence? Is there really no relationship between the delusions of what is called in the argot de jour “deranged mind” and the social environment?

Of course there is!

Biblical and medieval “visionaries” are a somewhat extreme example of the “deranged mind” of plain vanilla nut cases, but they can teach us quite a bit. Since antiquity, the content of what was called “a vision” was a product of the societal milieu. Prophet Ezekiel had the most bizarre visions of God riding a flaming chariot drawn by white horses. His visions, described in vivid detail, had an LSD quality to them. Yet, they were totally acceptable to his audience as the gospel truth. Likewise, medieval women (yes, they were mostly female) had visions of the Virgin. The most famous of them, Jeanne D’Arc, whipped the people of France into a religious frenzy by claiming divine orders to fight the invading English. The twentieth century produced different types of “visions”: radio transmitters implanted by U.S. Government agents in the brains of unsuspecting citizens in order to control their minds. More recently, black U.N. helicopters hiding in U.S. air force bases, ready to take over the country and impose a World Government. And in the last couple of decades –aliens flying saucers from outer worlds attempting to take over our civilization.

What’s common to all these, apart from being nutty? I would argue that they reflect the culture, the rhetoric, and yes – the propaganda of their respective times. In other words, the contents of these delusionary thoughts were a product of their respective environment. If one claimed nowadays that he saw God ascending to Heaven in a chariot he would be either committed to an insane asylum, or stoned to death for blasphemy against the religion. Could a French girl get her people go to war under orders from God? But stories about government agents and black helicopters gain astonishingly wide acceptance. Why? Because the cultural environment made the former ridiculous and the latter acceptable. Senator Patrick Moynihan had the same idea in mind when he explained the increasing acceptance of violence in our society as a result of “defining deviancy down”.

Does it take a “deranged mind”?

Apologists of the hate mongers (who are by and large the hate mongers themselves) claim that they should not be muzzled from exercising their right to a “vigorous debate” because of a few “deranged minds” in our society.

Wrong on both counts! Demonizing a political opponent as an America-hater, or worse, a traitor to his nation, is not a debate. On the contrary, it forecloses all rational debate; it is a condemnation, an incitement to hatred. And to assume that only “deranged minds” are susceptible to a violent environment is not borne out by the facts.

Again, examples from history abound. Suffice it to mention the Holocaust and the massacre of Rwanda. The facts are documented in painful detail: demonization of a minority, ratcheting up the decibels of the violent rhetoric, and massacre. The murderers were ordinary, law abiding citizens caught up in the centrifugal force of increasingly toxic speech. Deviancy was defined down, violence became acceptable.

Are we inherently better?

Belief in American Exeptionalism has become a litmus test for loyalty to the U.S. Yet, are we really exceptional? Are the Holocaust and the Rwanda massacres specific to “unexceptional” people? Two famous experiments soundly refute this self-congratulatory view of ourselves.

The Milgram experiment: Stanley Milgram, a professor of Psychology at Yale University, wanted to find out if a situation akin to the ready acceptance by the general German population of atrocities against the Jews could happen here. His volunteers were Yale University students. They, acting as “teachers”, were instructed to read a list of 4 words to a “learner” sitting in an adjacent room (in reality, a confederate of the experimenters). For the first wrong answer the “teacher” was to administer an electric shock, and for each additional error –additional shocks in increments of 15 volts, until they reach a maximum of 450 volts. Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology majors to predict the behavior of 100 hypothetical teachers. All of the poll respondents believed that only a very small fraction of teachers (the range was from zero to 3 out of 100, with an average of 1.2) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock.

In Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40) of experiment participants administered the experiment’s final massive 450-volt shock.

The Stanford Prison Experiment: Professor Zimbardo, who had been a student in Professor Milgram class, wanted to expand on the Milgram’s experiment. The question he asked was how would the participants react when placed in a simulated prison environment. “Suppose you had only kids who were normally healthy, psychologically and physically, and they knew they would be going into a prison-like environment and that some of their civil rights would be sacrificed. Would those good people, put in that bad, evil place—would their goodness triumph?” Zimbardo explained in one interview.

The researchers set up a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology building, and then selected 24 undergraduate students to play the roles of both prisoners and guards.

While the Stanford Prison Experiment was originally slated to last 14 days, it had to be stopped after just six days due to what was happening to the student participants. The guards became abusive, some to extreme, and the prisoners began to show signs of extreme stress and anxiety.

The most salient conclusions from these experiments:

Human minds, however “stable” and civilized, are susceptible to the powers of authority and to situational conformity. In other words, a hostile and violent environment makes any mind, not only the “deranged” one, susceptible to violent behavior.

There is no moral superiority to American kids –nothing exceptional about them in this respect. Given the right environment, I suspect many would replicate what German and Rwandan kids did.  So we’d better wake up to this reality and recognize that the hate in our speech and vitriol in our political discourse affects and infects many minds, deranged and as well as impressionable but otherwise completely stable minds.

It is the professional and moral obligation of the scientific and medical profession to speak up. They will be vilified by the professional hate mongers, demonized as “liberals” –yet they should speak up. It is our democracy that is at stake.

The Tucson Solution: 3 cups finely sifted white supremacy, 2 ethnocentric Tea Parties, One 2nd Amendment glock, extra magazine, liberal target...

... plus a gaggle of famous people to give it the wink and the nod it needs to settle. Neglect the psychiatric care of 1 or two citizens to mix, brew and serve to the "oppressor" of their choice. Scapegoat the servers when you catch them red-handed, execute them if you can - and the rest of us get off scott free. Repeat regularly for maximum fear of crazy people and national unity around insane policies.

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I think it's pathetic that Americans are really so selfish they would try to unravel the very health care protections that could have helped prevent Loughner from slipping through the cracks in the first place.

Loughner is more than just a little out there or eccentric, like the rest of us. I don't know how this man can be seen as being anything but seriously mentally ill when he prepared for and perpetrated these crimes...he belogned in a hospital well before he reached a point to where he could carry this out.

I hope the community handles this crisis in such a way that fellow residents are more, not less, inclined to get treatment if they start experiencing similar symptoms. This kind of event has the effect of scaring and shaming the people into silence who most need to develop insight and seek help with their thought or mood disorders. Any amount of compassion the public can show them now may avert another tragedy later.

I think it's pathetic and short-sighted that Americans are really so selfish they would try to unravel the very health care protections that could have helped prevent Loughner from slipping through the cracks in the first place.

Loughner is more than just a little out there or eccentric, like the rest of us. I don't know how this man can be seen as being anything but seriously mentally ill when he prepared for and perpetrated these crimes...he belonged in a hospital well before he reached a point to where he could carry this out, and should be in one now (a very secure one).

I hope the community handles this crisis in such a way that fellow residents are more, not less, inclined to get treatment if they start experiencing similar symptoms. This kind of event has the effect of scaring and shaming the people into silence who most need to develop insight and seek help with their thought or mood disorders. Any amount of compassion the public can show them now may avert another tragedy later.

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Here is Time's main page on the shootings. Below is just one of their articles...

If You Think Someone Is Mentally Ill: Loughner's Six Warning Signs

Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2011
By Kate Pickert and John Cloud
TIME

In retrospect, it's easy to see the evidence that Tucson, Ariz., shooter Jared Loughner was mentally unstable. In his community-college classes, he would laugh randomly and loudly at nonevents. He would clench his fists and regularly pose strange, nonsensical questions to teachers and fellow students. "A lot of people didn't feel safe around him," a former classmate told Fox News.

Given these facts and the horrific turn of events at a Safeway supermarket on Jan. 8 that left six dead and 14 others injured, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who remains in critical condition, could anything have been done to prevent the violence? What signs that trouble lay ahead were missed? What signs were observed but ignored? In short, what can be done to prevent a potentially ill or unstable person from harming others?

(See TIME's full coverage of the Tucson shooting.)

In most states, including Arizona, it's predictably difficult to detain someone involuntarily due to mental illness. If he is not deemed an imminent danger to himself or others, as determined by a judge, in almost all cases, treatment will not come without the person in question admitting that they are ill and need help. Even then, there is no guarantee that help will come readily or swiftly.

"What you have is an obvious need for more capacity in the mental-health system," says Dr. Ken Duckworth, a Harvard professor, psychiatrist and medical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). A need for more capacity is certainly true in Arizona. According to a 2005 report from the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit mental-health organization, the state had 5.9 publicly funded psychiatric beds per 100,000 people, compared with a national average of 17. In addition, NAMI gave the state's mental-health system a C in 2009, a step up from its D grade in 2006, but with vast room for improvement.

Part of Arizona's low marks stem from its large Native American and foreign-born populations, which are harder to reach and treat, as well as the state's rapid overall population growth and rural regions, which are underserved by medical professionals. Still, the state was not an outlier. In 2009, NAMI gave just six states B grades, while 18 got Cs, 21 got Ds and six got Fs. None received an A. (See pictures of Jared Lee Loughner's World.)

Regardless of resources available, however, the problem with someone like Jared Loughner is that, without a court order, he would not have received treatment without a self-referral. It appears that his community college, which kicked him out, rightly protected its own population — at least one student and one teacher told the New York Times they feared Loughner would bring a gun to class — but left the rest of the community vulnerable. It would have been up to Loughner to seek treatment, a move many psychiatrically ill people would never make.

"Most young people who develop a psychiatric illness — particularly a psychotic illness in which they've lost the ability to discern fantasy from reality — don't have a lot of insight into the fact that they are ill," says Duckworth. He points to a recent online NAMI survey that found that schizophrenics suffered an average of nine years between their onset of symptoms, which often first appear in the late teens and early 20s, and diagnosis.

Often, authorities can intervene only once the illness has taken a dramatic, if not criminal, turn. On the same weekend of the Giffords shooting, the FBI took John Troy Davis, 44, of Denver into custody for threatening the staff of Colorado Senator Michael Bennet. Davis had been a familiar voice to Bennet's office, often calling to complain about Social Security benefits. But on Jan. 6, he began to say things like, "I'm a schizophrenic and I need help," and "I'm just going to come down there and shoot you all." In a subsequent call, he claimed to have killed a woman to get the Senator's attention. He then said, "I may go terrorism." The FBI decided to move on the case.

Other than a public breakdown and a threat to order, however, institutions with some sense of guardianship over individuals, like schools, colleges and, perhaps, corporations, may be the only potential intervenors — though even then, their options are limited by law and by the efficiency of bureaucracies. "At an institution like a university, this [has become] an expected problem," Duckworth says of mental illness. He reports that mental-health professionals working in college settings are overwhelmed by the intensity of the illnesses they see and by the sheer numbers of students in need of treatment.

An investigation conducted after Cho Seung-Hui shot 32 people dead at his school, Virginia Tech, in 2007 found gaps in that state's mental-health system. Yet even proper execution of the state's existing laws might have prevented the tragedy, either by preventing Cho from buying a gun or by forcing him to receive outpatient treatment for his mental illness, which had been identified (in fact, Virginia Tech had him institutionalized briefly but did not follow up after his release). Officials fell down on both counts. "Even in states that have a more paternalistic leaning," says Duckworth, "it's frequently about not executing. There's a passive quality to [enforcement]." (Just this past December, the U.S. Department of Education issued a report saying Virginia Tech violated a federal law on the morning of the shooting by not doing more to warn students that a shooter was on the loose on campus. The university denies it acted improperly.) (See more about accused murdered Loughner appearing in court.)

In fact, Cho's case is closely analogous to Loughner's, and it is becoming clear that officials at Pima Community College could have noticed sooner that the student was dangerous and unstable. For at least 18 months prior to the Virginia Tech massacre, Cho had shown many disturbing signs: bizarre writings for classes that included revenge fantasies; the stalking of at least three women; near total silence, including with his roommates; and even involuntary commitment to a mental institution.

Similarly, it seems that Pima Community College (and Loughner's classmates and instructors) didn't do enough to recognize at least six warning signs in Loughner:

1. For months, he showed a classic symptom of psychosis: disorganized thoughts and speech. He routinely made irrelevant and nonsensical comments in classes. On one test, according to the Washington Post, he wrote, "Eat + Sleep + Brush Teeth = Math." On another test, he wrote, "Mayhem Fest!!!" (See what motivated Gabrielle Giffords' shooter.)

2. He showed another symptom of psychosis, or at the very least, an inability to function in social situations. One example from the New York Times: he enthusiastically read a poem in class in which he discussed touching himself in the shower.

3. He showed signs of paranoia, telling a classmate that U.S. currency was worthless and that the government was seeking to control people through grammar. He also became interested in a concept he called "conscious dreaming" (a concept at the heart of the mind-bending thriller Inception). (See photos of the outpouring of support for the shooting victims.)

4. He regularly smoked marijuana, and while there is only a small correlation between having a mental illness and committing violence, that correlation becomes much more significant when mental illness is combined with drug use, according to John Monahan, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia School of Law.

5. Several classmates said Loughner scared them. One of them even wrote e-mails in June saying she was afraid he would bring a gun to class. A teacher worried every time he had his back to Loughner that the student would pull a gun on him.

6. Loughner had five contacts with campus police, although it is not clear what behavior led to those contacts.

Hindsight is perfect, of course, but all institutions need to monitor students and employees who are consistently acting strangely. There was arguably enough evidence for Pima authorities to go to a judge and have Loughner involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, as Virginia Tech did with Cho. At the very least, the college could have required Loughner to check in with a counselor on a daily or weekly basis.



* Find this article at:
* http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2041733,00.html

---------------Below is a compilation of some of Jared's Youtube entries-----

Jared Loughner and The Deranged State of our State.

-----------From Democracy Now-----------

Jared Loughner, Mental Illness and How Budget Cuts

Have Slashed Behavioral Health Services in Arizona

January 11, 2011

AMY GOODMAN: While federal investigators and the news media try to uncover the motivation behind the attack, the picture emerging of Jared Loughner is of a severely disturbed 22-year-old who was behaving in an increasingly erratic manner. YouTube videos and other internet postings under his name suggest an obsession with bizarre anti-government grievances, including ramblings about currency policies and language control through grammar. Acquaintances in Arizona said Loughner had distanced himself from friends and family members in recent years.

In September, he was suspended from Pima County Community College after five run-ins with campus police for disruptive behavior, being thrown out of class, students saying they were afraid, professors saying that they were afraid of him. College administrators told him he needed clearance from a mental health professional saying he would not present a danger to himself or others before he could return to classes. Pima County behavioral health officials have no record of Loughner seeking treatment in the public system overseen by the Arizona State Department of Health Services.

Saturday’s attack and Jared Loughner’s apparent mental health problems have shone a spotlight on issues surrounding mental health treatment in Arizona. The state made drastic budget cuts to behavioral health services in 2010. The unprecedented cuts slashed all support services for non-Medicaid behavioral health patients and took away coverage for most name-brand drugs. As many as 28,000 state residents were affected. Meanwhile, Arizona is facing even bigger budget cuts this year and is facing an estimated $1.4 billion deficit in 2012.

H. Clarke Romans is the executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Southern Arizona. He’s joining us from Tucson.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about your response to what has taken place.

H. CLARKE ROMANS: Well, our response so far has just been to point out that the availability of services has diminished due to these budget cuts, and although there’s no direct link, it just makes it less likely that people would be able to get services, even if they overcome the stigma of admitting or acknowledging that they have these illnesses. It just makes the availability of services even more difficult to obtain.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think needs to happen now, H. Clarke Romans?

H. CLARKE ROMANS: Well, I think that the legislature has taken a simplistic approach to solving the budget crisis, with respect to mental health services, at least. What we’re finding in the community is that the costs were not really eliminated; they were just pushed down to less visible areas in the community, and we’re responding to the difficulties with the most expensive form of services that the community has to offer to people. That’s emergency rooms, hospitalization, law enforcement intervention. So, the communities are spending the money, even though it appears that the lawmakers believe that they have actually cut the budget and saved money. It’s just coming out of a different pocket down at the community level. And I think that we need to acknowledge that it ultimately is less expensive in the community to offer necessary services. And this is all without respect to the devastating impact this has had on people’s lives.

AMY GOODMAN: What had been the effect of the budget cuts, specifically?

H. CLARKE ROMANS: Well, I can give a number of examples, but in particular, people who have a serious mental illness diagnosis beginning last July were denied any further coverage in a number of areas—case management, brand-name medications, access to support groups, transportation subsidies, and more recently, housing subsidies. So these individuals who have the most serious forms of mental illness were essentially, except for generic medications, were basically pushed out of the system. And these are individuals who have a serious illness, who, in many cases, were managing with a support network, are now being pushed to the point where they can’t manage. So they’re decompensating. There’s suicide attempts. There’s one woman that we know that’s very ill, but she’s been managing OK. She’s now been hospitalized for 36 days over the last six months.

AMY GOODMAN: These budget cuts under Jan Brewer—she, in particular, the Governor, must understand, with her son Ronald in a state mental facility for, what, 20 years after being convicted of sexually assaulting a woman, but was by reason of insanity, was the ultimate verdict. So she knows and was a mental health activist herself, the Governor.

H. CLARKE ROMANS: Yes, she was. And frankly, to my surprise and many other of my colleagues, I don’t think she put up a strong enough battle to, you know, at least protect or minimize the effect on mental health services. I think she succumbed to the—kind of the ideologues who were pushing a different agenda. And she did make some statements that she wanted to protect mental health services, but ultimately I think she succumbed to the other political pressures.

AMY GOODMAN: What about your own story, H. Clarke Romans, how you got involved with the Alliance on Mental Illness?

H. CLARKE ROMANS: Well, I’m a member of a club that no one wants to belong to. And people become members when things happen to them like happened to my family. My son Kenneth was a smart, athletic, good-looking, popular young man, when his behavior became a little unusual. And we didn’t know what was going on. And eventually—we were living in Belgium at the time—a school counselor at the International School of Brussels called us up and said, "Gee, I think maybe Ken should be out of school for a while." And we were like, "What?" So we went to the school. Ultimately we took Ken to the doctor, a psychiatrist. And the doctor told us Kenneth is suffering from the symptoms of schizophrenia.

Well, I’m a highly educated, intelligent man. I couldn’t spell "schizophrenia," let alone have any idea what a devastating effect that was going to have on Kenneth, on the family, and for the rest of his life. And so, even though my son was killed by a drunk driver here in Tucson on September 11th, 2001, I’m still involved, because I think the indignities that Kenneth suffered in his life were not right, and I don’t want to see that happen to other people.

AMY GOODMAN: What about schools reporting? I mean, the teacher who alerted you, that’s very important. But here was Jared Loughner in college. Every classroom, it seemed, the kids, the students, the professors were concerned. They were scared. He was very disruptive. What does it mean for a school to get involved? And why don’t they? I mean, in this case, Pima County Community College says they did. They kicked him out.

H. CLARKE ROMANS: Well, I think there are two levels here, and the rules of the game are very different. When students are in high school and they’re minors, the school and the parents have a little more control. I mean, a few articles that I’ve read so far in the local paper indicate that some of these behaviors were already manifesting themselves in the—in high school. I mean, I read some of his high school classmates reported, you know, unusual behavior.

The difficulty for secondary schools is that if the teachers bring things to the attention of the parents and the parents take it to heart, that the school becomes financially responsible for a lot of assistance that the student might get. And due to budget cuts, a lot of principals and teachers, more or less, are instructed: don’t get involved, because if you do, the school is going to be financially responsible. And the schools are under tremendous financial pressure. So I think that’s a negative influence on the teachers. Even though school counselors and teachers deal with these students every day, they’re under kind of physical constraints.

When you get to college, it’s a different story, because, you know, by that time, generally the students are considered adults. The parents really don’t have any specific legal authority to force the person to do any particular thing. And only if a person is petitioned into the hospital due to their persistent behavior, there’s no way to force them to get treatment. They can be persuaded, and the college and the parents, I believe, have a role, a potential role, in persuading an individual to get help. I don’t know if the college did anything other than react to the negative behavior.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Pima County Sheriff Dupnik, he made the comment about the hate-filled language coming out of TV, radio, the talk shows. You have Jesse Kelly, the opponent of Congressmember Giffords, who put out a slogan that said something about targeting, taking on Giffords and bringing your M16 to a rally for Kelly. H. Clarke Romans, what this kind of explosive language does?

H. CLARKE ROMANS: Well, I think that it doesn’t help, particularly people who may have thought disorders or mood disorders, the part of their brain that would exercise caution—I mean, anybody that hears that kind of language may react to it. But people who are suffering from these mental process disorders don’t necessarily have the part of their brain that would set the boundaries. The cautionary or the commonsense parts of their thinking are not functioning properly. So, this kind of language has a much greater impact on individuals who are in that situation than on the average person who has, you know, the control of their thought processes and has in place the normal cautionary and restraining parts of the thought process. Many of these individuals, that part of their brain is not functioning properly, with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. There’s all kinds of thoughts going on, and the normal constraints and rational thinking processes aren’t there. So when you pour gasoline onto a hot situation, the likelihood of a fire is a lot greater than if—you know, if things are not so, you know, combustible.

AMY GOODMAN: Just to be exact, what her opponent, the Tea Party-backed opponent of Congressmember Giffords—and let’s remember that Congressmember Giffords’ father said—walked into the hospital and said that the Tea Party was her enemy, that he blamed the Tea Party. But Tea Party-backed candidate, Jesse Kelly, said, "Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly."

H. Clarke Romans, I want to thank you for being with us, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Southern Arizona.

AZ v. Loughner v. Arnold v. Sarn

The assassination attempt on AZ Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson this weekend - and the related murders of 6 bystanders, including a child - was deeply disturbing. The young man who appears responsible is seriously mentally ill. I wouldn't be surprised if he's diagnosed with manic depression, the label I carry with me when I chalk.

During a press conference today, one of the responding law enforcement officers suggested that "the problem" is that we don't have the mechanism we had in the 1960's "to incarcerate them", leaving homicidal manics to wander the streets, buy guns, and take out elected officials.

Sadly, however, in Arizona about all we do with the seriously mentally ill is incarcerate them - most for petty stuff. For every one person we put in the hospital in this state for the symptoms of their illness, in fact, we put ten behind bars. Arizona has been fighting court orders to improve community-based treatment for citizens with psychiatric disabilities for over two decades, investing far more in our resistance than we would need to in the solutions. Lives have been damaged and irretrievably lost in the process.

Is this tragedy one which might have been prevented by better treatment, hospital, and residential outpatient options for people with serious mental illnesses? I don't know. Could it have been prevented by more criminalization, longer sentences, fewer options for health and recovery? Highly doubtful. At what point would the system have identified, stopped, and treated Representative Gifford's shooter, and what would that treatment have looked like if such had been possible?

At the least, though, the rest of us could have made it harder for him to buy a gun and less likely that he might see himself as a hero for using it.

I tend to believe there's more we could have done, too. If we didn't collectively alienate and demonize people with mental illness so readily, then maybe it wouldn't be so hard to recognize when one needs help and seek it. If we didn't brutalize them in custody so often, then maybe they wouldn't be so paranoid about people with badges, uniforms, and guns - people with state power - trying to hurt them.

Think about it: suicide is 100% preventable. Homicide really should be as well. We've studied this stuff pretty extensively. So why are political solutions to crime still designed to just appeal to fear rather than actually reduce violence? It's not as if we lack the research or evidence-based practice recommendations. We appear to simply lack meaningful state leadership with both the knowledge and courage necessary to push through both public mental health care improvements and compassionate sentencing reform this year. They're still looking at how to gut the schools and community services while packing the prisons as cheaply as possible.

I'd hope that this devastating assault on Gabrielle Giffords would wake up Arizona's state legislators to what we need to be doing here to prevent the next such tragedy, not how to punish all potential such evil-doers actively exercising our first amendment rights without threatening a soul.

Now that they feel they're the main targets of the violence so many people face on a daily basis, it's possible that things will get much worse for us before they get better, however. We could face draconian - even criminal - sanctions for not agreeing with our doctor's medication recommendations. We could find our psychiatric diagnoses and treatment non-compliance become an aggravating factor, not a mitigating one, adding years of isolation and harsh punishment to our possible sentences - be they served under lock and key in state hospitals or state prisons.

They tried to pass such legislation recently as it is (sorry - can't find the link now).

We'll see. In the meantime, anticipating that they'll need to find some scapegoats to further advance their fascist agenda with this incident, watch each other's backs out there.