Society's Gross Acceptance

I’m going to make some broad-based assumptions and talk out of my ass for the next few paragraphs, so if that’s not your sort of thing then you can wait until the next post.

There’s a lot of talk about what to do when a terrorist shooter enters a movie theater, an elementary school, or, most recently a church, to carry out atrocities so gross I won’t mention them here.  Frequently they point to the assailant’s drug use, unstable mental state, and access to guns as the main reason why this occurred.  And, yes, at the time of the killings, these are all in play.  However, I doubt very much that the rage and initiative to carry out the murders was spurred on by sudden episodes of psychoses close to the time when the atrocities occurred.

No, my guess is that these people have been sick for a long time.  In the coming days, as the true victims are ignored, profiles of the killers will build, showing a history of neglect, abuse, drugs, and non-normative thinking.  The Left will claim that this is gun violence and something must be done about the guns.  The Right will ensconce themselves in the 2^nd amendment…which speaks more to the formation of militias than to individuals purchasing semi-automatic weapons for “sport hunting.”  (Side note: it’s not a sport when your opponent doesn’t know it’s playing.)

But, what’s the real issue here?  I’m going to argue that it’s how we treat our children with regards to mental health, and healthcare on the whole.  Having just gone through a major medical need, I will tell you that our medical professionals aren’t the ones to blame.  They’re diagnosing.  However, due to ridiculous insurance costs, the insurance companies frequently ignore the medical professional and prescribe what’s cheapest for them to treat.  Not only that, but until the Affordable Health Care Act, it was extremely difficult for low-income/lower-middle class families to afford comprehensive healthcare that provided for things aside from physical injury…things that were harder to define, such as mental health, and therefore, outside of what insurers would consider paying for.  Hell, this is the reason why most therapists don’t accept insurance.  They’ve got as many years under their belts as doctors, but the healthcare insurance companies treat them like they’re an auxiliary service, and don’t fully compensate them for their professional expertise!

Also, talk to any teacher, and they can immediately point out the students with issues.  But are they qualified to force a family to take them to a doctor?  And, frequently, our society is so obsessed with having children be or exceed the norm, that it’s potentially embarrassing to have the kid who needs extra attention.  So, what’s happened?  As a society, we’ve decided that it’s more important to appear normal and keep our issues to ourselves, until there’s a tipping point, when a perfect storm occurs and someone gets hurt.  And, even if it makes the most sense to get them to a medical healthcare provider, it’s not included under insurance policies.

We need to be better about reacting to our mental healthcare needs.  We need to stop these events years before they have the potential to happen.  We need ownership of our faults.  We also need to stop relying on law enforcement to take the brunt of the responsibility for these sick individuals.  The Right is correct: it’s not wholly about guns and the Left is correct that it is, somewhat on the abundant availability of weapons.  But, what is the most critical part is our ability to treat mental illness, affordably, without guilt, and years before an incident occurs.  Yes, there will always be assholes out there, but we need, again, to think about preventative treatment and not just superficial political band aids.