GUNS/MENTAL HEALTH/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump called again on Thursday [2-22-18] for the opening of more mental hospitals to help prevent mass murders like the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
Yet ramping up institutional care, experts say, likely would not have prevented most of the spree killings regularly making headlines in this country…
In the 1960s, states across the country began to close or shrink mental hospitals after a series of court decisions that limited the powers of state and local officials to commit people. The decline continued for decades, in part because of cuts in both state and federal budgets for mental health care. Those institutions housed people with severe mental disorders, like schizophrenia, who were deemed unable to care for themselves. And while spree killers may be angry and emotionally disordered, few have had the sorts of illnesses that would have landed them in hospital custody.
The latest school shooter, Nikolas Cruz, 19, was clearly troubled and making threats, and he was stockpiling weapons. But he had no mental diagnosis. He has been described as angry, possibly depressed, perhaps isolated — not so different from millions of other teenagers.
A full psychiatric evaluation, if he’d had one, might have resulted in a temporary commitment at best, but not full-time institutionalization, experts said.
The idea that more such institutions would prevent this kind of violence ‘is ridiculous, because you can’t put half the people in the country with a mental disturbance in mental hospitals,’ said Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia University who has studied mass killers.”
-Benedict Carey, “Opening Mental Hospitals Unlikely to Prevent Mass Shootings, Experts Say,” The New York Times online, Feb. 22, 2018