CNSNews.com is reporting that the hearings took place on March 5 and featured several experts as well as parents of mentally ill children who focused on the role of mental health in mass shootings such as the one that left 20 children dead in Newtown, Connecticut in December.
Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), a psychologist and chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s sub-committee on Oversight and Investigations, confirmed that the common factor in many of the mass shootings that have occurred in the U.S. in the recent past is mental illness.
“The lessons for Americans from the horrifying tragedy in Connecticut is that we had better take off our blinders and deal with such illness or we are sure to face the same problem again,” Rep. Murphy said. “It is not only what’s in a person’s hands that makes his act violent, it’s what is in his mind.”
And what gets into the mind often comes from the surrounding culture.
Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist, agreed, saying that culture can influence mental illness just like it does for our physical well-being.
“We now have a national imperative against obesity because we’ve understood that eating habits have some impact on actual physical illness,” Welner said. “But I will tell you, though, our fascination now -- indoctrination of a culture of young people with violence through entertainment media that are polluting the culture of this United States -- has to be dealt with the same way we dealt with the tobacco industry.”
He added: "The convergence of this poison – and it is a poison – on the developing minds and vulnerability is the last thing a paranoid individual who is alienated and isolated needs.”
These testimonies were followed by heart wrenching stories from parents of children with mental illness, such as Liza Long, whose blog "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother" went viral after the Newtown killings. Long is the mother 13 year-old Michael who has threatened to kill both her and himself on numerous occations.
“Like many children with mental disorders, my son has been diagnosed with several conditions,” Long said via video phone from her home in Idaho. “Michael has taken a cornucopia of pharmaceuticals to try to control his rages. “We have not yet found a combination of treatments and medications to manage his condition.”
Parents and mental health experts agreed that getting help for adult mentally ill children is especially difficult because of state laws and changes in the mental health system that occurred in the wake of John F. Kennedy's Community Mental Health Act. This legislation led to the closing of state mental hospitals, which many believe is what led to so many mentally ill people living on the streets or in prisons.
Rep. Murphy acknowledged the flaws in the previous approach to dealing with mental illness.
". . . 50 years ago, we released them from hospitals for reasons we mistook for compassion,” Rep. Murphy said in his opening remarks. “Too many of them ended up on the streets without decent access to treatment."
He added: "The majority of the mentally ill should be receiving care in the community setting, but for many with severe mental illness, de-institutionalization was a disaster, the after-effects of which we are still struggling to recover from, even today. Now, too many fill our prisons and are left as the wandering homeless.”
Or, as history has so sadly demonstrated, they're showing up in our schools and workplaces with a loaded gun in their hands.
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