Public Safety And Mental Health
Hello all, Henry here again. You may wonder at my last post where it seems that I am saying that there are no longer any psychiatric hospitals. We all know that there are many hospitals, but why are they not a safe place for patients and why did the system in Virginia not protect the students from a paranoid, mentally ill and very dangerous person?
Although I don’t know all the details of the story in Virginia, I worked in a mental hospital for some time and across much of North America the two reasons for committing a person to a mental hospital are that they are a danger to themselves or to others. Despite the fact that the shooter was suicidal and homicidal, he was not kept in the hospital.
There are two ways of entering a mental hospital as a patient. If one is the danger and refuses to enter the hospital, one can be committed. This is a legal process in which the state takes responsibility for the patient. Such patients can and are often held against their will, often in a locked ward.
The second way to enter the hospital is to sign oneself in, if you believe that you are better off there. The problem with this is that you can also sign yourself out at any time and in that sense is not really much help to community.
Generally, hospitals work on a revolving door system. The patient is stabilized on his medication, discharged to his living arrangement and when he stops his meds and reverts to his own behaviors or what they call decompensates, he reenters the hospital sooner or later and the cycle starts again. The great benefit of this approach is, from my point of view, not in making a better life for the most patients, but in saving money for the government and the medical system.
Since the shooting, many people have been asking why the shooter was not admitted to a mental hospital and usually the answer to this sort of question is that the system doesn’t really want them on a permanent basis and so people are not encouraged to have someone committed unless they’ve already done something extreme.
One reporter said that if he had ever been formally committed, he should not have been able to buy a gun with that on his record. Makes you wonder.