Mental health stigma denies my dignity

[HereSince1628]

52. I agree with you on Holmes, the Aurora shooter. The action of the therapist seems irresponsible

relative to the risk to the public. She KNEW he was ideating about harming people, although late in the game she passed that knowlege on to her employer the university. It is not correct to say that no one thought he was disturbed in that way. The university security also knew, but rather than pass information about a risk to the public the saw -their- problem as being resolved when Holmes left campus.

I think laws could be written and professional codes of conduct could be modified to punish such acts of licensed caregivers as a step to reducing that behavior.

Mass murder such as committed by Holmes, apparently randomly chosen targets not associated with workplace or family thankfully remain relatively rare. Unfortunately, the infrequency makes profiling likely perpetrators difficult so identifying and intervention by law enforcement is very sketchy, constructed policies for prevention are consequently sketchy and they are very likely to include significant biase that enables making errors on the side of caution.

So, I think it's important to be careful of strawman arguments carefully constructed to raitonalize validation of of civil rights violations and improper use of public authority. Along that path it's understandably easy to see how bad social policy can be loosed upon society... I suppose you remember how Cheney did this relative to torture by asking how acceptable torture would be if you thought someone knew where an activated atomic bomb was hidden in your city? Condi did a similar thing when she said we don't want our first evidence that something is wrong to be in the form of a mushroom cloud.

As it is, police often seem to poorly handle interactions with the mentally disordered. Based on just what we know through the news, there are a dozen or so incidents per year where police kill people when responding to calls for assistance or making their own contact with a person manifesting symptoms of mental illness. We don't know the actual numbers because there is no national database into which all police killings of civilians must be reported and so we don't know how much retraining and reconsideration of existing response authority needs to be done.

Public policy to prevent firearms violence must be constructed around unconditioned risk (as in the risk of someone dying in a plane crash which hypothetically might be depend upon frequency of flying associated with a particular type of job, or living near an airport), and authority for certain acts to contain or deal with the violence and it's aftermath -must- be constructed upon the conditioned risk (the risk of dying when you actually are in a plane when it is crashing).

If prevention is the public's goal, it must be based on unconditioned risk and policies must be commensurate with likelihood of risks. When scenarios are constructed that use language that prejudices the outcome, and 'unstable people' is just such a thing when considering mental disorders and firearm violence it makes assignment of a likelihood impossible. It presupposes the presence of an act isn't a likelihood but is actually very very likely to take place or appeals to few events, perhaps one, that has taken place.

You can't temper any argument with risk assessment when the risk is 100%. So no one should address an argument about what do you do to prevent events described by strawman arguments that depend upon fear rather than the proper risks of occurrence.

"Unstable" is a popular but basically undefined term and thereby useless as rhetorical tool in discussions about controlling mental illness to reduce gun violence.