Here we go again. I have lost count of how many times I have written posts like this. Exhibit 1, Exhibit 2, and Exhibit 3 .
Before I start, let me clear the ground for anyone who would want to jump on me, curse me, threaten me and/or call me names.
- Mass shootings by people with serious mental illness account for < 1% of annual gun related homicides. (1)
- Patients with serious mental illness count for 3% of violent crimes and even less in gun related violence. (1)
- This Epidemiological Research brings to light complex nature of violence and negates the absurdity of "Mental illness" talking point as a cause and effect, simplistic concept in context of the rampant gun violence problem in the United States.(2)
- According to The National Safety Council's report on the leading causes of death in the United States listed are: 1/370 people under the category of assault with a gun, death by a mass shooting 1/15,325, and accidental death with a gun 1/6904. All these numbers are higher than the chance of dying by an attack from a foreign terrorist and dying by being in a tornado or cataclysmic storms. (3),(4)
I can keep citing and trust me, I have done my research but I am not the one who needs convincing that guns ARE the problem.
Since the start of the year 2018 multiple gun related incidents have happened across the United States in various schools. Whether you want to quote the numbers with or without counting the number of children dead or not, is up to you. Take your pick. How many is too many? What is your threshold? What are you comfortable with? Please feel free to pick a number.
But I refuse to play this game anymore. In May 2014, I wrote this blog post that I would now call, De ja Vu after the Santa Barbara shooting. Since then, every time a shooting has happened, I have gone back and read it.
How many times I have felt that things are finally turning around? ZERO. And how many times I have felt that we are sinking down, deeper and deeper in this hole....100% of the time.
I am sick and tired of thoughts and prayers, because they don't bring back the dead children but only pander to the sold out, cowardly, selfish politics of our country.
I am refusing to be the next casualty of the economics of the gun industry's bottom line.
I do not want to hear another person telling me that guns don't kill.....because THEY DO. They are weapons made to KILL and to be used by willing humans, to do exactly what they were made to do.
I am not going to give up my right as a human being, as a mother and as a citizen of this country, to have my children go to school in the morning and to have the 100% expectation of them coming home in the afternoon, like they are supposed to. Or do you want to tell me that the right to bear arms, is somehow more important than a parent's right to not to have to bury a child, after being sprayed with bullets?
I refuse to be labelled as part of the problem because the sold out politicians have decided to trample on the mentally ill and point the finger, as they simultaneously take money from the gun manufacturers through the NRA, while they slash funding for mental health, public education, safety nets and refuse to do anything about enforcing the gun laws.
The two knee jerk responses; mentally ill and/or over medicated, need to STOP!!!!
Which direction do we go as providers? Because don't we full well know that there are millions of people with particularly violent ways of thinking, that has nothing to do with chronic mental illness and they don't come knocking on our doors to get help with changing their way of thinking?
We are losing our voice in this because the talking points are shaping the public perspective in our direction by lumping every angry, unhappy, disturbed and at times racially motivated individual as "mentally ill"? Before we know it, this will solely be a mental health problem.
It is our job as physicians, parents and mental health providers to speak up and point out that lumping every disturbed, psychopathic, angry, and criminal person, as a mentally ill patient, actually completely bars congress from doing anything at all. It's a cowardly cover for the incompetence of our political will.
Why do our patients have to suffer even more, when statistically we know that SMI patients are most dangerous to themselves and to those who intimately take care of them, (when acutely sick) and not just random students or mall goers?
Why do we have to keep making amends with every new shooting, only to repeat the heartache until the next "biggest mass shooting in U.S history"? Isn't every shooting bigger than the last one?
Why do we not talk about the trauma our first responders are subjected to every shooting, when they witness the carnage of these lethal weapons, used by a "law abiding citizen" who legally bought the gun/guns. tactical gear, magazines?
Why do we keep allowing the peripheral trauma to spread from these weapons to our every day life?
Why do I have to be okay with my young children being terrified of active shooter drills and that this is the norm in their education? Why don't we talk about the generation of traumatized children, who are growing up in this culture of people's right to own such weapons? Why do we keep giving up on their right to live their lives and hopes and dreams of future olympians, doctors, scientist, ballet dancers, cops, teachers?
United States doesn't have a monopoly on mental illness but it seems like we definitely are the worst in using mental illness as an scapegoat. Please help me understand what sort of unique "mental illness" is so prevalent in this country that we have over 30,000 firearm deaths every year and more mass shootings than any other developed country in the world?
I am sorry but you may need to take a vacation from hunting a deer with an AR-15 and use the good old fashioned hunting rifle along with your hunting skills, because we need to figure this out...NOW!!!
As a psychiatrist who treats SMI patients, I refuse to simply take this excuse that somehow the United States has a more seriously mentally ill population than the rest of the world, and by association, hand off the entire responsibility of the mass massacre culture onto my most vulnerable patients. I will not be an accomplice in making our children a walking target of this epidemic of inaction. This is not on my profession to fix. This is not on our children to fix, but this is on us to say ENOUGH!!!
I am here to say, mental illness is NOT evil and EVIL is not mental ILLNESS. Is that loud and clear enough for us to move on to the actual problem????
When will we be ready?????
When will be the time?????
When will we choose our children?????
When do we start saying and voting #NOTME #NOTMYCHILD ?
1- Gun Violence and Mental Health - APA 2016
2- Swanson, J. W., McGinty, E. E., Fazel, S., & Mays, V. M. (2015). Mental illness and reduction of gun violence and suicide: bringing epidemiologic research to policy. Annals of Epidemiology, 25(5), 366–376. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.annepidem.2014.03.004
3- Causes of Death in USA
4- http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowledge/Pages/injury-facts-chart.aspx
Before I start, let me clear the ground for anyone who would want to jump on me, curse me, threaten me and/or call me names.
- Mass shootings by people with serious mental illness account for < 1% of annual gun related homicides. (1)
- Patients with serious mental illness count for 3% of violent crimes and even less in gun related violence. (1)
- This Epidemiological Research brings to light complex nature of violence and negates the absurdity of "Mental illness" talking point as a cause and effect, simplistic concept in context of the rampant gun violence problem in the United States.(2)
- According to The National Safety Council's report on the leading causes of death in the United States listed are: 1/370 people under the category of assault with a gun, death by a mass shooting 1/15,325, and accidental death with a gun 1/6904. All these numbers are higher than the chance of dying by an attack from a foreign terrorist and dying by being in a tornado or cataclysmic storms. (3),(4)
I can keep citing and trust me, I have done my research but I am not the one who needs convincing that guns ARE the problem.
Since the start of the year 2018 multiple gun related incidents have happened across the United States in various schools. Whether you want to quote the numbers with or without counting the number of children dead or not, is up to you. Take your pick. How many is too many? What is your threshold? What are you comfortable with? Please feel free to pick a number.
But I refuse to play this game anymore. In May 2014, I wrote this blog post that I would now call, De ja Vu after the Santa Barbara shooting. Since then, every time a shooting has happened, I have gone back and read it.
How many times I have felt that things are finally turning around? ZERO. And how many times I have felt that we are sinking down, deeper and deeper in this hole....100% of the time.
I am sick and tired of thoughts and prayers, because they don't bring back the dead children but only pander to the sold out, cowardly, selfish politics of our country.
I am refusing to be the next casualty of the economics of the gun industry's bottom line.
I do not want to hear another person telling me that guns don't kill.....because THEY DO. They are weapons made to KILL and to be used by willing humans, to do exactly what they were made to do.
I am not going to give up my right as a human being, as a mother and as a citizen of this country, to have my children go to school in the morning and to have the 100% expectation of them coming home in the afternoon, like they are supposed to. Or do you want to tell me that the right to bear arms, is somehow more important than a parent's right to not to have to bury a child, after being sprayed with bullets?
I refuse to be labelled as part of the problem because the sold out politicians have decided to trample on the mentally ill and point the finger, as they simultaneously take money from the gun manufacturers through the NRA, while they slash funding for mental health, public education, safety nets and refuse to do anything about enforcing the gun laws.
The two knee jerk responses; mentally ill and/or over medicated, need to STOP!!!!
Which direction do we go as providers? Because don't we full well know that there are millions of people with particularly violent ways of thinking, that has nothing to do with chronic mental illness and they don't come knocking on our doors to get help with changing their way of thinking?
We are losing our voice in this because the talking points are shaping the public perspective in our direction by lumping every angry, unhappy, disturbed and at times racially motivated individual as "mentally ill"? Before we know it, this will solely be a mental health problem.
It is our job as physicians, parents and mental health providers to speak up and point out that lumping every disturbed, psychopathic, angry, and criminal person, as a mentally ill patient, actually completely bars congress from doing anything at all. It's a cowardly cover for the incompetence of our political will.
Why do our patients have to suffer even more, when statistically we know that SMI patients are most dangerous to themselves and to those who intimately take care of them, (when acutely sick) and not just random students or mall goers?
Why do we have to keep making amends with every new shooting, only to repeat the heartache until the next "biggest mass shooting in U.S history"? Isn't every shooting bigger than the last one?
Why do we not talk about the trauma our first responders are subjected to every shooting, when they witness the carnage of these lethal weapons, used by a "law abiding citizen" who legally bought the gun/guns. tactical gear, magazines?
Why do we keep allowing the peripheral trauma to spread from these weapons to our every day life?
Why do I have to be okay with my young children being terrified of active shooter drills and that this is the norm in their education? Why don't we talk about the generation of traumatized children, who are growing up in this culture of people's right to own such weapons? Why do we keep giving up on their right to live their lives and hopes and dreams of future olympians, doctors, scientist, ballet dancers, cops, teachers?
United States doesn't have a monopoly on mental illness but it seems like we definitely are the worst in using mental illness as an scapegoat. Please help me understand what sort of unique "mental illness" is so prevalent in this country that we have over 30,000 firearm deaths every year and more mass shootings than any other developed country in the world?
I am sorry but you may need to take a vacation from hunting a deer with an AR-15 and use the good old fashioned hunting rifle along with your hunting skills, because we need to figure this out...NOW!!!
As a psychiatrist who treats SMI patients, I refuse to simply take this excuse that somehow the United States has a more seriously mentally ill population than the rest of the world, and by association, hand off the entire responsibility of the mass massacre culture onto my most vulnerable patients. I will not be an accomplice in making our children a walking target of this epidemic of inaction. This is not on my profession to fix. This is not on our children to fix, but this is on us to say ENOUGH!!!
I am here to say, mental illness is NOT evil and EVIL is not mental ILLNESS. Is that loud and clear enough for us to move on to the actual problem????
When will we be ready?????
When will be the time?????
When will we choose our children?????
When do we start saying and voting #NOTME #NOTMYCHILD ?
1- Gun Violence and Mental Health - APA 2016
2- Swanson, J. W., McGinty, E. E., Fazel, S., & Mays, V. M. (2015). Mental illness and reduction of gun violence and suicide: bringing epidemiologic research to policy. Annals of Epidemiology, 25(5), 366–376. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.annepidem.2014.03.004
3- Causes of Death in USA
4- http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowledge/Pages/injury-facts-chart.aspx
As a fellow mother and psychiatrist, I completely agree. Not another child. We can no longer allow the NRA to run our country. We have to vote put the politicians who get in the way of progress. Trump talks better mental health, but cuts health care. They do not actually want things to change. If they did their answer wouldn't always be "well there is nothing we can do."
ReplyDeleteGun laws do save people. Before Bush let the assault rifle ban lapse in 2004 these types of mass shootings were not happening with this regularity.
Thank you for being unafraid to speak truth
Thanks for speaking up, with me.
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