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‘Real News’: Calls to Address Mental Health Reform Grow Louder After Newtown Shooting

Dec. 20, 2012 8:48pm Christopher Santarelli

In addition to gun control measures, the horrific shooting massacare in Connecticut last Friday is expected to shine light on how we address the mentally ill in our society, and where reform is needed. As of now authorities are desperately trying to confirm more anecdotal information about Adam Lanza’s mental state and what may have motivated him to gun down twenty children in their first grade classes at a Newtown elementary school less than a week ago.

The Hill reports that major mental health advocacy groups have been lobbying on Capitol Hill and have been meeting with legislators and their staff since the shooting to formulate an agenda for strengthening community-based services for the mentally ill, early diagnosis and treatment of ill children, and efforts to erase the stigma that surrounds the illness.

Still, in the Newtown case, is pointing to mental illness not enough to answer what caused this crime and how to prevent crimes like it in the future? The majority of people with psychiatric disorders to not commit violent crimes, and putting too much blame on Lanza’s mental illness could raise already unfair stigma against the mentally ill.

On ‘Real News’ Thursday the panel discussed what role mental illness may have blamed in Adam Lanza’s actions, the history of government involvement in care for the mentally ill, and what reform on mental health issues this terrible shooting could influence. Watch a clip below with Professor Christopher Ferguson, author of “Violent Crime:”

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Comments (12)

judyaz
Posted on December 28, 2012 at 11:33pm
I worry about our freedoms and rights when it comes to Government intervention and funding to control mental health. There’s listening in and reporting, from social media to email and telephone calls, mandatory drugs and commitment. This will be more abused than not, perpetrated on the innocent public as regulation, control, misuse of power to “protect” us from a few criminally mentally ill. It can be a tool for state control. political agendas in the guise of “health, welfare and safety.” Glenn wrote a book called, Agenda 21.

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dballred
Posted on December 21, 2012 at 8:29pm
I don’t think it’s helpful to bring mental health reform into the context of a mass murder–regardless of the peretrator’s mental state. All this does is encourage similarly disturbed individuals to gain sympathy by doing the same thing. I really wish the media would spend at least a half of the energy they exercise vilifying Tea Party and NRA members on viifying the truly vile: the perpetrators. They, and their first degree enablers (in this case, the mother) should be denied any amount of respect or pity.

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Priscilla King
Posted on December 21, 2012 at 3:41pm
Asperger’s Syndrome, itself, isn’t dangerous. Drugs like cocaine, Prozac, methamphetamine, Zoloft, LSD, et al., are dangerous. We need to destigmatize the natural process of living with brain quirks that don’t cause violent insanity, like Asperger’s Syndrome, and we also need to make sure anyone using drugs that are associated with violent insanity, like most of the “new antidepressants,” is either hospitalized or at least well supervised. Forget about the stigma. Think about saving lives.

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- Spitfire1938
  Posted on December 21, 2012 at 4:04pm
  Not to worry… once ‘O’care is fully “Enforced”, ‘Defectives’, young or old, and the physically, mentally, emotionally, “Disabled” will be Euthanized by “Cost Control” panels and PWD’s will never be a problem in Amerika again!
  
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reality based lifeform
Posted on December 21, 2012 at 10:40am
Compelling arguement by expert linking violent video games to school shootings and mass killing behavior . I think this clearly explains whats happening to our youth .
http://www.killology.com/on_combat_ch2.htm

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What the Heck
Posted on December 21, 2012 at 9:16am
This is a hugh issue for sure but to think the only solution is getting rid of guns is a drop in the bucket. Parents and friends have no help when they know something is wrong, and can be sued if the DR. says nothing is wrong. We have mentally ill walking our streets and SOMEONE knows they might blow at any time.
People kill people so education in our schools would be helpful, having a nation understand personal responsibility with a rule book for life,
No killing, no lying, no stealing, no adultry having something so important it is first in you life might be a sign something is wrong.

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Eastinfection
Posted on December 21, 2012 at 8:14am
Ironically enough, one of the largest mental hospitals in the U.S. is in Newtown, though it closed it’s doors in 1995.

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- Eastinfection
  Posted on December 21, 2012 at 8:25am
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfield_State_Hospital
  
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JungleTrump
Posted on December 21, 2012 at 7:13am
Sure people need help But ask yourself: Why do they need help? What kind of environmental or societal issues brought them to this? Could it be education? Could it be both parents working to pay for that million dollar home? hmmmmmm. Could it be the absence of a supreme moral figure?

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- Eastinfection
  Posted on December 21, 2012 at 8:18am
  All of those things contribute to moral and behavioral decay but the fact remains that a large percentage of “unstable” persons in this country used to be neutralized as threats via being committed to asylums.
  
  That doesn’t happen anymore. Now we drug them up and send them on their merry way.
  
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AbrahamsSheepdog
Posted on December 21, 2012 at 3:08am
This isn’t gonna cost more monopoly money is it? Damn it.

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Zorch
Posted on December 21, 2012 at 1:13am
This is so typical of the “Democrats” we have come to know. First they remove something from American citizens that is working in the name of fairness, then they want to implement their programs later, to show how they are responding to the needs of society. “Democrats” were the ones who fought so very hard to disallow institutionalization of the mentally ill, because doing so “hurt their feelings or made them feel like they were not a part of society”, but today, AFTER repeated weapons attacks by the medical zombification of people who needed to be institutionalized and kept under observation by professionals, “major mental health advocacy groups have been lobbying on Capitol Hill and have been meeting with legislators and their staff since the shooting to formulate an agenda for strengthening community-based services for the mentally ill, early diagnosis and treatment of ill children, and efforts to erase the stigma that surrounds the illness”.
Once upon a time, we had fairly good programs to treat the mentally ill. The programs could have been tweeked, instead of abolished, possibly causing untold deaths. America HAS GOT to concern herself with the psychotropics the psychiatric community promotes and distributes to millions of school age children, affecting their growing brains, sometimes permanently, in collaboration with public school personnel and should be punishable by imprisonment.

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