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It’s Long Past Time for National Discussion About Mental Illness
epoch times ^ | 8/8/2019 | BRIAN CATES

Posted on 08/08/2019 10:56:18 AM PDT by bitt

After two horrific mass shooting incidents last weekend, the United States is once again locked into the same frustrating routine that follows such tragedies.

In El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, deeply disturbed individuals shot and killed more than 30 people in two separate events.

Many Democratic politicians running for president immediately began using the incidents in their fundraising, calling for gun bans and more gun control laws, such as bringing back the lapsed “assault weapons ban.”

President Donald Trump took a far different approach when he stated that it’s time to begin grappling with mental health reform, and I think he’s right.

Trump outlined five steps he intends to take in response to these latest mass slayings.

Set up partnerships between the Department of Justice, local state and federal agencies, and social media companies to identify and act on early warning signs of someone threatening a mass shooting. Stop the glorification of violence in our society, which includes video games and other forms of mass entertainment where the act of killing is celebrated in a “culture of violence.” Reform the mental health laws to more accurately identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence to ensure they get treatment when necessary, they must be involuntarily confined. Ensure that people judged to be a risk to public safety have their access to firearms taken away by due process. Quickly and decisively administer capital punishment for those who commit mass slayings, without yearslong delays. Trump acknowledged some of these proposed steps will be very hard to achieve, such as the second one, which calls for a cultural change. Trump himself said:

“Cultural change is hard. But each of us can choose to build a culture that celebrates the inherent worth and dignity of every human life. That’s what we

(Excerpt) Read more at theepochtimes.com ...


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Extended News
KEYWORDS: mentalillness; qtards
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1 posted on 08/08/2019 10:56:18 AM PDT by bitt
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To: Whenifhow; null and void; aragorn; EnigmaticAnomaly; kalee; Kale; 2ndDivisionVet; azishot; ...

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2 posted on 08/08/2019 10:56:54 AM PDT by bitt (Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul - Douglas MacArthur)
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To: bitt

Yes, mental illness...

Everyone does know who is going to be declared mentally ill, right?


3 posted on 08/08/2019 10:58:22 AM PDT by DoughtyOne (This space for rent.)
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To: bitt

Here is the problem.

I was listening to Dr. Laura’s satellite radio show and she claims that radical feminists have basically hijacked the curriculum at any institution where one might train to become a therapist.

They might conclude that being a straight male is a form of mental illness, and then they come for your guns.

Like everything else in this country mental health has been thoroughly, utterly politicized.


4 posted on 08/08/2019 10:59:13 AM PDT by Buckeye McFrog (Patrick Henry would have been an anti-vaxxer.)
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To: bitt

They used to lock up crazies. Now they register them to vote as democrats.


5 posted on 08/08/2019 10:59:33 AM PDT by I want the USA back (The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it. Orwell.)
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To: bitt

Like when we used to institutionalize crazy folks?

The left dumped them all in the street.


6 posted on 08/08/2019 10:59:39 AM PDT by 2banana (My common ground with islamic terrorists - they want to die for allah and we want to kill them.)
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To: bitt

As long as there is patient confidentiality and police can’t do sh** before someone kills someone, and people get meds (which are ALWAYS experimental) instead of being confined, nothing will change.


7 posted on 08/08/2019 10:59:48 AM PDT by Sacajaweau
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To: bitt

This is the ruling that destroyed our mental health system and shut down the states’ psychiatric hospitals. It must be overturned if we’re to stop these horrible mass killings.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/527/581/


8 posted on 08/08/2019 11:00:58 AM PDT by ryderann
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To: DoughtyOne

Exactly. And don’t forget how this will be abused by personal vendettas in situations like divorce.


9 posted on 08/08/2019 11:01:05 AM PDT by Tell It Right (1st Thessalonians 5:21 -- Put everything to the test, hold fast to that which is true.)
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To: bitt
Agreed that there needs to be a larger recognition that this is a problem however this term of National Discussion (conversation) is worn-out by now and the left only wants to converse on their point of view.
10 posted on 08/08/2019 11:01:22 AM PDT by capydick (“Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems men face.)
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To: bitt

The left wants to funny-farm the right.
The right wants to funny-farm the left.

Of course the right is right.

But it would depend on who is in power at the time.


11 posted on 08/08/2019 11:02:10 AM PDT by Migraine
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To: bitt

There are no more discussions, only conflicts.


12 posted on 08/08/2019 11:02:15 AM PDT by JimRed ( TERM LIMITS, NOW! Build the Wall Faster! TRUTH is the new HATE SPEECH.)
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To: bitt

Get back to Church regularly, put the Ten Commandmants on display in all public schools, acknowledge God in all our ways.

Stop murdering our children in the womb; stop encouraging and celebrating sexual perversion and all things lgbtq, which are an abomination to God.

Then and only then will this nation be healed.


13 posted on 08/08/2019 11:02:22 AM PDT by MichaelCorleone (Jesus Christ is not a religion. He's the Truth.)
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To: Tell It Right

Oh absolutely.

Gun owners should NEVER go to an shrink either. During the registration they’ll ask if you own weapons.

So if you actually need help, they’ll treat you as a hostile before the sessions even begin.

I opted out the last time I wanted some counseling during a rough patch. Never again...


14 posted on 08/08/2019 11:05:42 AM PDT by DoughtyOne (This space for rent.)
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To: bitt

...which, I submit is a sub-section of societal sickness - please read this old shortened editorial:

No Guardrails - August 1968 and the death of self-restraint.

(Editor’s note: This editorial appeared in The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 1993.)
The gunning down of abortion doctor David Gunn in Florida last week shows us how small the barrier has become that separates civilized from uncivilized behavior in American life. In our time, the United States suffers every day of the week because there are now so many marginalized people among us who don’t understand the rules, who don’t think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them, who have no notion of self-control. We are the country that has a TV commercial on all the time that says: “Just do it.” Michael Frederick Griffin just did it.

(snip)

As the saying goes, there was a time. And indeed there really was a time in the United States when life seemed more settled, when emotions, both private and public, didn’t seem to run so continuously at breakneck speed, splattering one ungodly tragedy after another across the evening news. How did this happen to the United States? How, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, did so many become undone?

We think it is possible to identify the date when the U.S., or more precisely when many people within it, began to tip off the emotional tracks. A lot of people won’t like this date, because it makes their political culture culpable for what has happened. The date is August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention found itself sharing Chicago with the street fighters of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

The real blame here does not lie with the mobs who fought bloody battles with the hysterical Chicago police. The larger responsibility falls on the intellectuals—university professors, politicians and journalistic commentators—who said then that the acts committed by the protesters were justified or explainable. That was the beginning. After Chicago, the justifications never really stopped. America had a new culture, for political action and personal living.

With great rhetorical firepower, books, magazines, opinion columns and editorials defended each succeeding act of defiance—against the war, against university presidents, against corporate practices, against behavior codes, against dress codes, against virtually all agents of established authority.

What in the past had been simply illegal became “civil disobedience.” If you could claim, and it was never too hard to claim, that your group was engaged in an act of civil disobedience—taking over a building, preventing a government official from speaking, bursting onto the grounds of a nuclear cooling station, destroying animal research, desecrating Communion hosts—the shapers of opinion would blow right past the broken rules to seek an understanding of the “dissidents” (in the ‘60s and ‘70s) and “activists” (in the ‘80s and now).

Concurrently, the personal virtue known as self-restraint was devalued. In the process, certain rules that for a long time had governed behavior also became devalued. Whatever else was going on here, we were repeatedly lowering the barriers of acceptable political and personal conduct.

You can argue, as many did and still do, that all this was necessary because the established order wouldn’t respond or change. But then you still need to account for the nation’s simultaneous dive into extensive social and personal dysfunction. You need to account for what is happening to those people within U.S. society who seem least able to navigate the political and personal torrents that they become part of, like Michael Griffin. Those torrents began with the antiwar movement in the 1960s.

Those endless demonstrations, though, were merely one part of a much deeper shift in American culture—away from community and family rules of conduct and toward more autonomy, more personal independence. As to limits, you set your own.

The people who provided the theoretical underpinnings for this shift—the intellectuals and political leaders who led the movement—did very well, or at least survived. They are born with large reservoirs of intelligence and psychological strength. The fame and celebrity help, too.

But for a lot of other people it hasn’t been such an easy life to sustain. Not exceedingly sophisticated, neither thinkers nor leaders, never interviewed for their views, they’re held together by faith, friends, fun and, at the margins, by fanaticism. The big political crackups make the news—a Michael Griffin or the woman on trial in Connecticut for the attempted bombing of the CEO of a surgical-device company or the ‘70s radicals who accidentally blew themselves up in a New York brownstone. But the personal crackups just float like flotsam through the country’s hospitals and streets. You can also see some of them on daytime TV, America’s medical museum of personal autonomy.

(snip)

These weaker or more vulnerable people, who in different ways must try to live along life’s margins, are among the reasons that a society erects rules. They’re guardrails. It’s also true that we need to distinguish good rules from bad rules and periodically re-examine old rules. But the broad movement that gained force during the anti-war years consciously and systematically took down the guardrails. Incredibly, even judges pitched in. All of them did so to transform the country’s institutions and its codes of personal behavior (abortion, for instance).

In a sense, it has been a remarkable political and social achievement for them. But let’s get something straight about the consequences. If as a society we want to live under conditions of constant challenge to institutions and limits on personal life, if we are going to march and fight and litigate over every conceivable grievance, then we should stop crying over all the individual casualties, because there are going to be a lot of them.

Michael Griffin and Dr. David Gunn are merely two names on a long list of confrontations and personal catastrophe going back 25 years. That today is the status quo. The alternative is to start rethinking it.


15 posted on 08/08/2019 11:06:21 AM PDT by elpadre (AfganistaMr Obama said theoal was to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-hereQaeda" and its allies.)
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To: MichaelCorleone

I’ve reached the point where I cannot see any measure short of a Darwin solution. It’s getting to be “them” or “us”. Time to thin the herd, they are like rabid animals, there is no cure.


16 posted on 08/08/2019 11:06:39 AM PDT by Segovia
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To: ryderann

Do we have to read the whole thing?

Can you summarize?

Can’t discriminate because of the ADA and so can’t institutionalize?


17 posted on 08/08/2019 11:07:39 AM PDT by Sequoyah101 (We are governed by the consent of the governed and we are fools for allowing it.)
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To: bitt

The left in congress are avoiding it because they don’t want to get institutionalized


18 posted on 08/08/2019 11:08:31 AM PDT by Bob434
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To: Segovia

Rabid animals - that is a great way to put it. And quite accurate.


19 posted on 08/08/2019 11:10:29 AM PDT by MichaelCorleone (Jesus Christ is not a religion. He's the Truth.)
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To: bitt
It’s Long Past Time for National Discussion About Mental Illness

Yes, but the Q nonsense continues.

WiggywAKI.

20 posted on 08/08/2019 11:11:45 AM PDT by humblegunner
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