I was in Toronto when I caught the news of the Arizona shootings. Coincidentally that evening, a Pakistani cab driver wiled away a few moments in heavy traffic by directing my attention to the new CAMH mental health facility that was still under construction in the city center. He commented on the huge number of residential patients it was expected to house and then added that it was a good thing because so many more people are in need of mental health services in these difficult times.
This got me to thinking about what must be the state of Arizona’s mental healthcare preparedness. There is a mental healthcare crisis in most states, and having heard about patients dropped from transplant lists under the hard-nosed penny-pinching of Jan Brewer’s Arizona, it was unsurprising to find the following in the June 2010 newsletter of the American Psychiatric Association:
In Arizona-which, according to the report, has the highest likelihood that a severely mentally ill person is in prison rather than a hospital-TAC reports that there are 47,974 prisoners and 827 individuals occupying inpatient psychiatric hospital beds. Assuming that 16 percent of inmates have a serious mental illness, that means that 7,676 individuals in Arizona jails and prisons have a serious mental illness-or 9.3 times more than are receiving hospital treatment for such an illness.
So, Arizona seems to have come to the conclusion that the best way to deal with mental illness is to wait until the patient triggers the law by harming himself or someone else. Jared Lee Lougher will now join that warehoused population.
There are a lot of take-aways from this latest incident of senseless, preventable violence. Most will center on the angry political rhetoric directed at Tea Party outliers and other unstable individuals. Some will focus on the complete absence of gun regulation in wide-open Arizona. Unfortunately, little attention will be paid to what this illustrates about the crisis in mental healthcare throughout the country.
Even that Toronto cabdriver, transplanted from a country full of it’s own horrific troubles, readily recognizes the urgency of the mental health need and the value to be had in addressing it effectively. What is the matter with the American public who will tolerate their elected representatives intoning the text of the sanitized Constitution and referring to it as “sacred” (yes, I heard a Democratic House member actually use that word twice), while they still refuse to face the fact that so long as both the mental and physical health of their constituents is not regarded as a right, solemn references to the document meant to uphold the values of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” represent the most grotesque kind of travesty?
It would appear, at least anecdotally, that the majority of Americans would choose the broadest popular interpretation of “the right to bear arms” over the narrowest insurance of those seminal values in our Declaration of Independence. It’s no wonder we have become such a dangerous cipher for much of the world beyond our borders.
There’s more than one reason for Arizona’s abysmal record of care for the mentally ill, but the highly profitable prison industry is one of the most prominent.
Arizona really seems like a libertarian utopia. Sad that my son will never see the Grand Canyon or the OK Corral…
I just listened to an interview conducted by Elliot Spitzer and Kathleen Parker on CNN with Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik who has received a lot of criticism for speculating that the massacre might have been triggered by right-wing rhetoric. When asked if he thought the shooter’s ease in obtaining high-powered weaponry should be a topic for discussion, he essentially said there is no point in even discussing gun control since there are so many guns out there all over the country that it is impossible to stop anyone from obtaining them. So there it is. If we are to follow his reasoning, it is simply too late to do anything about guns in this country. It’s the old barn-door scenario; and the “cows” have already scattered to the four winds. So I understand why some people think we have no alternative other than to arm ourselves, each and every one of us. But Congresswoman Gifford was opposed to regulation herself, and she does own a gun…a lot of good that did her.
Here’s the thing. Maybe it is too late and we can’t expect to control guns even if we want to; but perhaps some effort should be directed at not glorying in that particular passage of the Bill of Rights that has led us to this unique juncture in civilized history. If we’ve been able to see the folly in things like the “three-fifths” language of the Constitution, can we not cast an equally appraising eye on the Second Amendment? Is our democracy so fragile that it can’t withstand scrutiny by twenty-first century eyes and ethicists? There is something wrong when a U.S. Congressman can use the word “sacred” to describe our national code of laws, enacted by men who valued good judgement in the Age of Reason, thereby affording it a kind of unquestioning reverence usually reserved for texts believed to be handed down from a god.