On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 9:57 PM, Hank Fung <[email protected]> wrote:
> Talk radio was on the mental illness thing on Friday afternoon. Local > radio hosts John and Ken were poo-pooing gun control and making the case > for reinstutionalization well before the viral articles like "I am Adam > Lanza's mom" popped up. The chatter had already tried to analyze Ryan Lanza > when he was alleged to be the killer based on his Facebook page. So > speculating on Adam Lanza was to be expected. > Hank here provided me with the clue that untangled my own little mystery; a little investigation and backtracking on the FB pages of some of my "friends", as well as just asking them, reveals that the common thread in most of the cluster of posts on my FB page yesterday morning was indeed the "I am Adam Lanza's mom" post ( http://thebluereview.org/i-am-adam-lanzas-mother/) that apparently did go viral over the weekend. Most of the posts to my page quoted, or paraphrased, several lines from this piece (without attribution, but then FB is not an academic paper), accounting for the eerie similarity. By sunday afternoon I had seen the headline for this piece on several aggregators, but had not clicked through to read it. After Adam's post here last night I found it and read it, then did some backtracking and asking. I guess this accounts for the bipartisan nature of some of the "lets talk about mental illness, not gun control" line that I think David noted, and I have also seen, though it is now clear to me, after looking into this for a while, that the line is being used systematically by conservatives and proponents of the gun lobby as one part of their strategy to change the subject from gun regulation. But it is also being used by a group that I am pretty familiar with, having worked with them for more than 25 years - what I guess can be called the mental health lobby, though more specifically is the advocacy groups for families of people diagnosed with severe and chronic mental disorders. These people are often desperate, and feel very much alone and victimized, often confused and terrified by what is happening to a child or sibling or parent, without any clear answer, or sometimes bombarded by three or four very clear and mutually contradictory answers. Gawker has an interesting piece on the backlash to the "I am Adam Lanza's Mother" essay ( http://gawker.com/5968983/writer-of-i-am-adam-lanzas-mother-blog-post-criticized-as-unfit-mother-with-own-history-of-violent-tendencies-mental-illness ). The main takeaways as I see them are: 1. Funding for Mental Heath has been systematically gutted since the Reagen administration, and treatment, research and patient and family support all need a huge investment just to catch-up; 2) Severe, chronic mental disorders suck, big time; while we have made some progress in treatment, it is still true that there is more that we don't know than know about these phenomenon, and most people who get them are going to be substantially impaired for a long time, often the rest of their lives; 3) Mental disorders are not the key to understanding or solving the epidemic of gun violence in this country. Most people with mental disorders are no more violent than anyone else, and we have no reliable method of identifying in advance who is about to go off on a shooting spree. There is a lot we don't know about Adam Lanza, but unless he specifically said "I am going to take my mothers's semi automatic weapons and go kill some people", even had he been getting the best state-of-the-art mental health treatment it is unlikely anyone would have been able to predict what he was about to do, or stop him. On the other hand, if semi automatic weapons were illegal, it is much less likely (though not impossible) that his mother would have had three of them lying around her house, and it would have been more difficult for Lanza, mentally disordered or not, to fire off as many rounds as he did in as short a time as he did. If he had revolvers or a standard rifle instead, maybe he is tackled or stopped before he shoots his way into the locked school last Friday morning, or maybe he is stopped after he shoots the principal and school psychologist in the hallway, or maybe he is stopped after he fires the first six rounds in one of the first grade classrooms. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
