Sir Barken Hyena writes:
I hope no trigger warning is needed for this, but it’s about Isla Vista.
One thing that I would hope we can agree on is that the mental health profession has failed this country. Most of these shooters have been on psychotropics, or were seeing mental health professionals. I’m not saying drugs were the cause, and I’m not saying we need Minority Report style prescience in predicting future atrocities. However, the proliferation of these ghastly incidents indicates – at the least – that the system has failed to protect the public, which along with treating their patients must surely be among their primary functions.
Why are so many taking these drugs now? From conversations in various places I see many of us have taken these drugs and had some troubling reactions. I myself took an anti-depressant for about 6 months, following the end of my wife’s chemo for breast cancer. And it helped me too, I was in shell shock afterwards and didn’t know it.
But it also loosed something in me, and I found myself blowing up at work, something that never happened before. And it was unsettling because a part of me knew I was totally wrong but I felt a kind of righteous satisfaction at my anger that propelled it. And I was detached, watching it from a distance, even feeling the anger at a distance. This is something I hadn’t felt before, ever, and while I thankfully can’t peer into the minds of these shooters, some of the vibe that comes off of their words and videos seems to emanate from a similar place. I quit the pills once I caught on to this and haven’t had a problem since.
If psychotropics can make a (please don’t laugh) normal bloke like me feel detached from reality, what might they do to someone truly ill like Eliot Rodger? It’s a good question and I for one have doubts that the medical profession can answer that question.
If you are for, or against gun control, you know where to go, who to donate to, who to vote for. Same goes for those feminists inclined to action of some sort.
Some of which might help, I don’t know. But until we all, whether pro- or anti-gun control, Right or Left, hold our noses and link hands and demand some action from the mental health profession on this epidemic of madness and legally prescribed drugs I don’t think we’ll ever be able to turn the corner on this.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
1. We don’t know how many people may have refrained from acting out violently because their treatment helped them. Only the failures like Rodgers become known.
2. Psychology is a pseudo-science. Psychiatry might be as well. At best, it is highly inexact and cannot cure many types of aberrant behavior such as autism or schizophrenia.
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Psychiatrists don’t claim that they can cure schizophrenia or autism. These conditions can be treated (schizophrenia with anti-psychotics and therapy, autism with behavioral and educational intervention), and schizophrenics and autistics who are being treated tend to do better than those that aren’t treated. I’m not sure that the case is all that different from medicine in general: we don’t exactly know why insulin resistance arises in Type 2 diabetics; we can’t cure diabetes; we can treat it; and diabetics tend to do better when treated.
(Though I agree that psychology is a pseudo-science.)
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“We don’t know how many people may have refrained from acting out violently because their treatment helped them. Only the failures like Rodgers become known.”
That’s probably true, but the problem is, there is literally no action that you can’t defend using logic like this. “We don’t know how many terrorist attacks Bush’s invasion of Iraq prevented”; “Our actions in Vietman prevented the rest of SE Asia from falling to Communism”; “Obama’s surveillance program and drone strikes have prevented hundreds of terror attacks” – Stuff like that. Now I think that probably some of the above statements are true, and maybe all of them are, but they are very difficult to prove, because we don’t know the counterfactuals. Whatever the overall efficacy of treatment is, it didn’t stop Rodgers; that, we know for sure.
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Continuing events like these give the lie to the “smoke detector principle” that we hear about for why we need increasingly Nazi levels of expert, authoritarian involvement in our everyday lives. Sure, suspending that 6 year-old boy who pointed his chicken nugget and said “bang” was overkill — but with a system so sensitive, just imagine how effective it is when it comes to *real* threats.
Ramping up the rate of false positives should reduce false negatives, if the false positives result from lowering the threshold of what sets off the alarm. “By transitivity,” seeing the system respond to a threat of level minus 10 makes us feel safe that it’ll deal with anything greater than minus 10, like plus 10.
In reality, the system just seems to go after whoever will provide a convenient example, like that fish-stick-pointing kindergartener. If shameful cases like that had truly come about from a stricter set of standards, than we wouldn’t see as many real cases of spree / rampage violence.
This applies equally to the cops as to the mental health experts. The cops had been tipped off that something was way outta-whack with this loser, they even interviewed him, but gave him a pass without searching his place where they would’ve found his weapons cache.
Good old useless cops — busting some teenager’s ass for skateboarding on the sidewalk, then letting someone off the hook who witnesses say is nuts and about to pop. And then showing up too late, as always. They may be good at solving crimes after the fact, but not at preventing them. Ditto the shrinks. They all saw it coming after he went on a spree.
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Well said.
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“And then showing up too late, as always”
Hence the phrase “Dial 911 and die”
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