Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

Full disclosure: Am autistic dude, care quite a bit about this issue.

One thing I've been seeing a lot lately, is how with all the shootings, both sides of the debate have clamored about mental health reform as very much the default assumption with the "fix". The left says: We'll reform the way mental health is treated in this country and then add more gun control. The right says: We'll reform the way mental health is treated in this country and then improve security and enforcement. I feel like I'm about to make it a bit more complicated for some of ya'll.

In general, I think mental health reform is a great idea, as I feel it's not addressed well enough in the country as it stands. That hasn't changed due to this. But seeing it develop as a response to how certain individuals are harming society feels like a bad source for this to happen, and somewhat reminiscent of the start of the drug war. I am very concerned that Congress will pass some "compromise" that generalizes mental illness and restricts our rights and ability to succeed in society to alleviate the public's worry on this issue, beyond the reasonable.

There's a few reasons I feel this could happen:

1. As it stands, Congress looks worse and worse by the day by doing nothing much at all about the shootings. They could really do for passing anything, even just a mental health bill, to improve their reputations for the election. They don't have any direct voting backlash for harming the rights of particularly uncommon mental illnesses, as they aren't a deciding factor in the vote. The backlash on such a law relies entirely on people speaking for us, and that's not a good enough guarantee for me. It's the only really bipartisan thing I've seen about this debate, and in this age the more independents you get to vote for your party the better, so there is some good incentive.

2. Let's be real here, it's much easier than almost any other minority group to dehumanize people with mental illnesses, we can often behave in ways that seem unnatural to mentally well folk, and with more severe illnesses it can feel almost uncanny valley to them. It's human nature, but it poses a risk here. With us being associated to these horrible people, it feels like our reputation declines with the public every day, though I do admit the association isn't unjustified.

3. The fact that this is brought up now, with the goal in question being "stop shootings" and not "improve people's lives when dealing with mental health" leaves me very worried. I'm not saying it's completely unreasonable to block people with certain mental illnesses from having weaponry, but I can see this whole topic extending into a general bill, and with the basis not being our own interests I have doubts it will care for our lives as much as a reform should.

4. I debate the idea that a bunch of politicians could really grasp the issues we go through. Humans in general struggle enough understanding each other in normal circumstances, I don't know if I can expect people with their own lives to deal with to understand folks who have brains and thought processes very different from the norm. And not just one form of deviance from the norm, quite a list of them.
If a mental health advocacy group gained steam with a bill proposal I could trust them to get it right. They have experts and people who've experienced mental illness on their teams a lot of the time. But if the main support comes from the folks advocating about firearms i'm not sure they'll hit the mark much at all.

Overall, I just don't think a time period where we have America recovering from tragedies and looking for something to blame or an immediate fix, is a good time to work on legislation to improve the lives of those accused of being the cause. Too much potential for vindictive or not well-thought out laws without advocates for the actual issue being the primary source and movement behind it.

When every single mass shooter in the last 20 years has had a history of being on psychotropic drugs, usually as a result of ADD and ADHD, is a reason why mental health and mass-shooting are interlinked. Does that mean that every person on these drugs a risk? No. But clearly there is a powerful link. That the largest cohort of people that were prescribed these medications were White males in the early 90s, is reflective of the fact that majority of these mass shootings are young, white, males.

Improving people's lives is a separate debate from whether or not there is a risk associated with psychotropic medication, and mass shootings.

This isn't about dehumanizing. This isn't a personal attack on you, or people with mental illness. If you are going to be serious about preventing and mitigating mass-shootings, you cannot, absolutely cannot, ignore the mental health issues surrounding these events. You cannot ignore that the mental health issues are similar, and the kind of drugs used are also similar.

It was only 2016 that background checks were able to circumvent certain HIPPA laws that prevented detailed mental health history to go into a background check.

>Too much potential for vindictive or not well-thought out laws without advocates for the actual issue being the primary source and movement behind it.

Exactly right. Which is exactly what most laws around gun-control amount to after a major incident. Barrel stock limitations, banning suppressors, having no understanding what guns are and how they work, using made up terms like "Assault Style".

> When every single mass shooter in the last 20 years has had a history of being on psychotropic drugs, usually as a result of ADD and ADHD, is a reason why mental health and mass-shooting are interlinked. Does that mean that every person on these drugs a risk? No. But clearly there is a powerful link. That the largest cohort of people that were prescribed these medications were White males in the early 90s, is reflective of the fact that majority of these mass shootings are young, white, males.

No drug prescribed to someone with ADHD is going to push them closer to going on a gun rampage. They get prescribed drugs because they have underlying psychological problems, ones that drugs alone can't treat. I speak as someone who takes meds for ADHD daily and am familiar with the drugs used to treat it.

At least 36 school shootings and/or school-related acts of violence have been committed by those taking or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs resulting in 172 wounded and 80 killed according to CCHR.

SSRIs (anti-Depressants) and ADHD medication being the top two culprits. CCHR has a list of 36 mass shooters, and what drugs they were on: https://www.cchrint.org/school-shooters/

Using the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS) data, Thomas Moore, Joseph Glenmullen and Curt Furberg, which was published by PLoS One on December 15, found that such "adverse events" are indeed associated with antidepressants and several other types of psychotropic medications. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0015337

Their conclusions: We identified 1527 cases of violence disproportionally reported for 31 drugs. Primary suspect drugs included varenicline (an aid to smoking cessation), 11 antidepressants, 6 sedative/hypnotics and 3 drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The evidence of an association was weaker and mixed for antipsychotic drugs and absent for all but 1 anticonvulsant/mood stabilizer.

https://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/stimulantsideeffects/

The fact that such a huge number of kids being prescribed these drugs at such young ages have no adverse affects? Psychotropic drugs that render kids into obedience have no permanent effects?

The FDA acknowledges these side affects. That in the 90s 3-5% of kids were thought in need of ADHD medication. In 2013? 11%, and rising.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/magazine/generation-adderall-addiction.html

WebMD side affects of Adderall: https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-63163/adderall-oral/details/list-sideeffects

Ritalin the dejure drug for ADHD also has a risk of violence on the medication, that is well documented.

Again. This is not personal. This is not about you.

@chewybunny

I was not really expecting a strong response to this, huh.

I've never really heard of that theory before, that the drugs are causing it. I'm a bit bothered you treated my view as emotional "it's about me" without considering that man. If you look at it from the standpoint of treating mental disorders, or dealing with the isolation of being mentally disabled, to prevent people from "snapping", my standpoint would make more sense. Those are the only alternative causes for the incidents I can think of anyway, disorder-caused or society-caused. To do either of those things is usually described as "getting help" with your mental disorder, and both forms of support would improve the lives of the affected. The alternative would be to isolate mentally ill people further so they can't physically do harm to normal folk, which is what I was concerned about.

The drug theory is interesting though, albeit it's more a drug reform than a mental illness reform. I'd need to see better elimination of the possibility of just correlation though, to trust the theory. I'm not certain how firm a science rare side effects are, since it's very much a precautionary thing. A study that shows that people with certain mental illnesses are criminals disproportionately when they're under drugs would help some, tho it doesn't cover the fact that high drug use is naturally correlated to severe mental issues. That last tidbit is why I have some critical feelings towards that theory most of all. Chicken and Egg which came first, the mental state to commit violence or the propensity to take drugs.

The fact that such disparate drugs are correlated actually makes me more suspicious, as one would think that such side effects would fall more in patterns with 1 specific kind of drug, while on the other hand mental illnesses are well-known to often overlap disproportionately. Perhaps I'm ignorant though and antidepressants and ADHD meds do share more in common than I imagine in that area. It's also counterintuitive that withdrawing and taking the drugs would have similar effects.

Edit: did some rudimentary research, can't find any obvious evidence to correlate the top drugs in the study, other than the 2nd and 3rd being SSRIs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_serotonin_reuptake_inhibitor

Might be worth investigating the mechanisms involved with SSRI drugs and seeing what drugs also run along similar lines.

Is there a connection between gun violence and domestic abuse?