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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Gun Violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gun Violence. Show all posts

Thursday, September 5, 2019

Trump eyes mental institutions as answer to gun violence

Kevin Freking
Associated Press
Originally published August 30, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

But Trump’s support for new “mental institutions” is drawing pushback from many in the mental health profession who say that approach would do little to reduce mass shootings in the United States and incorrectly associates mental illness with violence.

Paul Gionfriddo, president and chief executive of the advocacy group Mental Health America, said Trump is pursuing a 19th century solution to a 21st century problem.

“Anybody with any sense of history understands they were a complete failure. They were money down the drain,” said Gionfriddo.

The number of state hospital beds that serve the nation’s most seriously ill patients has fallen from more than 550,000 in the 1950s to fewer than 38,000 in the first half of 2016, according to a survey from the Treatment Advocacy Center, which seeks policies to overcome barriers to treatment.

John Snook, the group’s executive director, said Trump’s language “hasn’t been helpful to the broader conversation.” But he said the president has hit on an important problem — a shortage of beds for the serious mentally ill.

“There are headlines every day in almost every newspaper talking about the consequences of not having enough hospital beds, huge numbers of people in jails, homelessness and ridiculously high treatment costs because we’re trying to help people in crisis care,” Snook said.

The info is here.

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Stop Posturing and Start Problem Solving: A Call for Research to Prevent Gun Violence

Kelsey Hills-Evans, Julian Mitton, and Chana Sacks
AMA Journal of Ethics. January 2018, Volume 20, Number 1: 77-83.
doi: 10.1001/journalofethics.2018.20.01.pfor1-1801.

Abstract

Gun violence is a major cause of preventable injury and death in the United States, leading to more than 33,000 deaths each year. However, gun violence prevention is an understudied and underfunded area of research. We review the barriers to research in the field, including restrictions on federal funding. We then outline potential areas in which further research could inform clinical practice, public health efforts, and public policy. We also review examples of innovative collaborations among interdisciplinary teams working to develop strategies to integrate gun violence prevention into patient-doctor interactions in order to interrupt the cycle of gun violence.

An Ethical Obligation to Address Gun Violence

More than twenty survivors of the Pulse nightclub massacre traveled together to Boston, Massachusetts, in the days before the one-year anniversary of that horrific night. They met with a group of physicians, nurses, social workers, administrators, and others at our hospital to talk about their experience. They recounted their memories of the sounds of gunfire, the screams of those around them, and the moans from those felled beside them. They described the ups and downs that have characterized their attempts to rebuild in the year since gunfire shattered their sense of normalcy. They shared their stories in the hopes that if more people could understand what it means to be affected by gun violence, then we, as a nation, would be compelled to act.

The article is here.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Colorado Looks to Broaden Therapists' Power to Prevent School Shootings

by Dan Frosch
The Wall Street Journal
Originally published March 6, 2016

In a state that has been battered by mass shootings, Colorado lawmakers are trying a new, focused approach to stopping bloodshed in schools.

A proposed bill would broaden the circumstances under which mental-health professionals can report a student that they believe poses a threat, an issue that has drawn increasing attention around the country

Colorado law requires mental-health workers to alert authorities if a patient expresses a specific, imminent threat, and mandates that they warn those being threatened.

The proposal would permit therapists to alert school administrators about a potentially dangerous student even if that danger isn't immediate. It would apply to all public and private schools, as well as institutes of postsecondary education. Counselors who are school district employees are already permitted such latitude under federal law, but many schools contract with outside mental health workers to treat students, and some students are in private therapy as well, experts said.

The bill, which has bipartisan support, sailed through Colorado's House of Representatives last month by a vote of 51-12. It now heads to the Senate, where it is expected to have the backing of members of both parties.

The article is here.

Monday, January 18, 2016

Under Gun Rules, FBI Will Receive Health Data

By Robert Pear
The New York Times
Originally posted January 6, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Virtually every push for new gun sale restrictions in recent years has been greeted by opponents countering with proposals to address mental health as a factor in gun violence.

“For those in Congress who so often rush to blame mental illness for mass shootings as a way of avoiding action on guns, here’s your chance to support these efforts,” Mr. Obama said at the White House on Tuesday.

But that challenge moved the administration into a thicket of difficult health questions. Under a rule published Wednesday in the Federal Register, the background check system run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation will receive the names of people who are forbidden to buy or own firearms because they have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution or found to pose a danger to themselves or others.

The article is here.

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Mental Health Reform Will Not Reduce US Gun Violence, Experts Say

Rita Rubin
JAMA.
Published online December 16, 2015. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.16421

Here is an excerpt:

But while few people would disagree with the need for mental health reform, scientists who study gun violence say it won’t make much of a dent in the number of homicides and attempted homicides committed with firearms. That’s because although mass shooters are likely to be mentally ill (but not necessarily diagnosed), high-profile mass shootings represent only a small fraction of US gun violence, the vast majority of which is committed by people who are not mentally ill. In addition, most people with mental illness are not violent; they are far more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of shootings.

People should realize that “even though it feels that mass shootings happen all the time, they’re still extremely rare,” said Jeffrey Swanson, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University.

Through early December 2015, about 450 individuals died in mass shootings in the United States last year, according to Mass Shooting Tracker, a crowd-sourced website that defines a mass shooting as one in which at least 4 people have been shot but not necessarily killed (http://bit.ly/1MuHpVL). Compare that with 11 208, the number of people killed in homicides committed with firearms in 2013, the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has US data (http://1.usa.gov/1GEJ0TN).

The entire article is here.

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Is Gun Violence a Public Health Crisis?

Science Friday Podcast
Ira Flatow is the Host and Executive Producer

On Wednesday, a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California left 14 people dead, making it one of the deadliest in modern American history. In fact, there have been more mass shootings than there have been days in 2015 so far. Of course, gun violence in the United States isn’t restricted to mass shootings—firearm homicides and suicides far outpace the number of mass-shooting fatalities. Taken together, an estimated 32,000 people die as a result of gun violence in the United States annually, and an additional 180,000 to 190,000 people are injured, says Sandro Galea. He’s the dean of Boston University’s School of Public Health and one of a number of researchers calling for firearm deaths to be treated as a public health issue. Another is Garen Wintemute, of the UC Davis School of Medicine, who has done extensive research on the effects of access to guns. Wintemute and Galea join Ira to discuss why they see gun violence as a public health issue and what research must be done and steps taken to address the problem.

The podcast is here.

Thursday, September 3, 2015

Blaming Mental Illness for Gun Violence

BY Alex Yablon
The Trace
Originally posted September 1, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Add it all up, and the “mental health” post-shooting playbook looks as calculated to ensure political inaction as it is the appearance of sensitivity. The general public would hardly disagree with statements by Trump, Bush, and others that the severely mentally ill pose a danger; in fact, surveys show that more Americans blame failures of the mental health system for mass shootings than any other factor. Meanwhile the Republican base — not to mention mental health professionals — would hardly countenance any action to expand the reach of background checks to block gun purchases by people with personality disorders or other mental health issues that are not quite so debilitating as conditions that require hospitalization, like schizophrenia or psychosis. So politicians can make statements like “The common thread we see in many of these cases is a failure in the system to help someone who is suffering from mental illness” (Scott Walker, the day after the WDBJ shooting), knowing full well they will not result in any action that could anger their pro-gun supporters.

In fact, framing incidents of gun violence as the product of unsettled perpetrators, versus firearms risks, may influence support for given solutions among the general public. An NPR article published on August 31 describes a psychiatric study in which two groups of subjects were given hypothetical news articles about a mass shooting, slightly altered to emphasize different underlying causes. Readers of the version emphasizing the need to “keep dangerous guns off our streets” were more likely to support limits on gun magazine capacity.

The irony of the psychiatric turn in debate on new gun law is that, for the most part, a body of research shows the severely mentally ill are among the least of our worries when it comes to violent crime, especially when compared to other risk factors. Alcohol, for example, is a factor in 40 percent of all violent acts committed in the United States today, according to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.

The entire article is here.

The full title is: The Political Strategy Behind the GOP’s Post-Shooting ‘Mental Health’ Playbook

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms

By Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD, and Kenneth T. MacLeish, PhD
American Journal of Public Health: February 2015, Vol. 105, No. 2, pp. 240-249.
doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2014.302242

Abstract

Four assumptions frequently arise in the aftermath of mass shootings in the United States: (1) that mental illness causes gun violence, (2) that psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime, (3) that shootings represent the deranged acts of mentally ill loners, and (4) that gun control “won’t prevent” another Newtown (Connecticut school mass shooting). Each of these statements is certainly true in particular instances. Yet, as we show, notions of mental illness that emerge in relation to mass shootings frequently reflect larger cultural stereotypes and anxieties about matters such as race/ethnicity, social class, and politics. These issues become obscured when mass shootings come to stand in for all gun crime, and when “mentally ill” ceases to be a medical designation and becomes a sign of violent threat.


The entire article is here.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

With Guns, Suicide Is the Biggest Problem

By Sarah Wickline
MedPage Today
Originally posted April 11, 2014

Every day, 88 people die from firearm-related injury; two-thirds of those deaths are suicides, a high proportion of which are committed by seniors and individuals living in rural areas, researchers reported here.

"Mass shooting episodes are obviously horrible," Molly Cooke, MD, president of the American College of Physicians (ACP), told reporters in a press briefing. "But one of the points we make in the paper is that every day there are 88 firearms-related deaths."

The entire article is here.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Concentrating on Kindness

Tania Singer helped found the field of social neuroscience. Now she wants to apply what has been learned—by training the world to be more compassionate through meditation.

Kai Kupferschmidt
Science 20 September 2013:
Vol. 341 no. 6152 pp. 1336-1339
DOI: 10.1126/science.341.6152.1336

Empathy made Antoinette Tuff a minor celebrity. On 20 August, a young man armed with an AK-47 and 500 rounds of ammunition burst into the school in Decatur, Georgia, where Tuff works as a bookkeeper. It might have ended in yet another senseless mass killing if it hadn't been for Tuff's compassionate response to the gunman, recorded in its entirety because she had dialed 911.

As the man loads his weapon, Tuff seeks a human connection with him. She talks of her own struggles, her disabled son, her divorce, her thoughts of committing suicide. Finally, she persuades him to lay down his weapon, lie down on the ground, and surrender to the police. "I love you," she says near the end of the call. "You're gonna be OK, sweetheart." (Only after the man is arrested does she break down, crying "Woo, Jesus!")

Tuff's heroic conversation, posted on the Internet, was hailed by many commentators as evidence of the power of empathy and the value of compassion. If more people were like Tuff, there would be less violence and suffering, they say.

The entire article is here.

Thursday, October 3, 2013

People With Mental Illness ‘More Likely To Have Violence Done To Them Than To Inflict Harm On Others’

By Candice Leigh Helfand
CBS News - DC Office
September 18, 2013

Here are some excerpts:

In light of the news, the call for mental health care reform – especially in regards to better funding and availability of mental health programs – could be heard from individuals and organizations alike throughout the U.S. following the elementary school attack. The call for more stringent gun control was even louder, given Lanza’s easy access to a high-powered assault rifle – a Bushmaster XM15-E2S.

Ultimately, the administration of President Barack Obama set forth legislation that, in essence, married the two issues. The gun control proposal he announced in early January included a number of potential restrictions on guns and assault weapons as well as requests for funding that would go specifically toward expanding mental health treatment programs.

(cut)

“I think the challenge is this: if you look across all mental health disorders throughout the United States … nearly half of all adult Americans had a mental health disorder at some point,” Sherry A. Glied, the newly-appointed dean of New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, said to CBSDC. “The vast majority of those people have never engaged in anything violent.”

As well as all of those who have, at one point or another, grappled with mental illness, mental health problems presently plague over a fourth of the entire population of the U.S. According to the National Institute on Mental Health, approximately 26.2 percent of American adults ages 18 and older suffer from some form of mental illness.

Experts worry that stigma “might actually lead to people being reluctant to seek help,” as Dr. John Duby, the chair of the Mental Health Leadership Workgroup at the American Academy of Pediatrics, noted.

The entire story is here.

Monday, June 17, 2013

Families of Violent Patients: 'We're Locked Out' of Care

By Gary Fields
The Wall Street Journal
Originally published on June 7, 2013

Suzanne Lankford for seven years has tried and failed to get long-term mental-health care for her son. When she hears news of a gun rampage or other violence, she gets chills.

"Whenever I see the parents saying they tried to get help, I think, 'That could be me,' " she says.

Ms. Lankford has watched her son, Joshua Rockwell, today 28 years old, barricade himself inside a room to ward off imaginary assassins. He once knocked her out with a blow to the head. She called the police on him after recognizing him in a mall security video of an armed robbery. Charges are pending.

He was later charged with attacking and harassing a nurse and law-enforcement officer. That trial has been delayed several times.

After Ms. Lankford's punch to the head, she asked her son's doctors about his treatment. She received a standard answer: Privacy laws prevent his doctors from talking to her without his permission, because he is an adult. His lawyer declined to comment citing the pending charges. Mr. Rockwell, who is in custody, declined to comment through his mother under the advice of his attorney.

When America began dismantling its government-run mental institutions a half-century ago, the U.S. started creating privacy protections and made it tougher to forcibly hospitalize people. The goal was to allow the mentally ill to live something close to a regular life.

Today, after a series of high-profile shooting rampages, many with links to mental illness, the U.S. is re-examining this approach. Some of the loudest voices for overhaul are from the families of the mentally ill—a first line of defense.

"We have been asking for information on Josh's medications, on his treatment plan…so that we can help him meet those obligations, but we're locked out," Ms. Lankford says. "I don't know how this story ends."

The entire story is here.

Monday, May 20, 2013

Mental Evaluations Endorse Insanity Plea in Colorado Shootings, Defense Says

By Jack Healy
The New York Times
Published May 13, 2013

Mental health experts who evaluated the man accused of killing 12 people in a Colorado movie theater last year have offered a diagnosis that bolsters an insanity plea in the case, his lawyers said at a hearing here on Monday.

“We now have a diagnosis that’s complete,” Daniel King, a defense lawyer for the suspect, James E. Holmes, said in court. “We now have an opinion by qualified professionals.”

Mr. Holmes, 25, a former graduate student in neuroscience, faces 166 counts of murder, attempted murder and weapons charges in the July 20 shooting during a midnight premiere of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises” at an Aurora movie theater. Officials say he slipped out of an emergency exit shortly after the movie began, sheathed himself in commando-style gear and then returned through the same door to spray the sold-out crowd with gunfire.

Mr. Holmes’s lawyers made a long-expected move on Monday to change his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity. At an arraignment in March, a judge entered a straightforward not guilty plea on Mr. Holmes’s behalf after his lawyers said they were not ready to enter a plea.

The entire story is here.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

One Fifth Of Suicidal Teens Have Access To Guns At Home

By Joseph Nordqvist
Medical News Today
Originally published May 6, 2013

Around twenty percent of adolescents in the U.S. who are considered "suicidal" have guns in their homes, according to a recent study published at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Washington, DC.

In addition, the researchers revealed that 15 percent of those at risk of suicide know how to use the guns and the ammunition and have access to both.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, among young people between the ages of 10 and 24, suicide is the second leading cause of death.

Around half of teenage suicides are carried out using a firearm.

Suicide is a serious public health issue worldwide. It is the most prevalent cause of death in female teenagers and the second most common among male teenagers after road traffic accidents. Official estimates reveal that suicide causes close to 164,000 deaths every year.

The researchers carried out the study to create and develop a new tool for doctors to use which can help identify teenagers and young adults who require some form of intervention to prevent them from harming themselves. They asked the youths about their access to firearms as well as ammunition.

The entire story is here.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Suicide Risk Linked to Rates of Gun Ownership, Political Conservatism

Science Daily
Originally published April 4, 2013

Residents of states with the highest rates of gun ownership and political conservatism are at greater risk of suicide than those in states with less gun ownership and less politically conservative leanings, according to a study by University of California, Riverside sociology professor Augustine J. Kposowa.

The study, "Association of suicide rates, gun ownership, conservatism and individual suicide risk," was published online in the journal Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology in February.

Suicide was the 11th leading cause of death for all ages in the United States in 2007, the most recent year for which complete mortality data was available at the time of the study. It was the seventh leading cause of death for males and the 15th leading cause of death for females. Firearms are the most commonly used method of suicide by males and poisoning the most common among females.

Kposowa, who has studied suicide and its causes for two decades, analyzed mortality data from the U.S. Multiple Cause of Death Files for 2000 through 2004 and combined individual-level data with state-level information.

The entire story is here.

The journal article can be found here.

Evangelical Pastor Rick Warren's son recently suicided by hand gun.

That story is here.

Friday, March 22, 2013

8th grade student commits suicide in school

WXYZ.com Action News
Originally published March 21, 2013

Southgate Community Schools superintendent Bill Grusecki says an eighth grade student committed suicide Thursday morning at Davidson Middle School.

Police say the boy was found in a restroom before classes began at about 8:15 a.m. Another student discovered the boy and alerted a teacher. Staff members immediately stepped in and called police.

The boy was transported to a hospital where he died.

The student died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Police say he had a .40-caliber handgun. Police are not releasing the boy's name until family has had time to notify all relatives.

Then entire tragic story is here.

Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Suicide, With No Warning

By Elisabeth Rosenthal
The New York Times - Sunday Review
Originally published March 8, 2013

Here are some excerpts:

But more than 60 percent of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides, like Mr. Lewiecki’s. Reducing that statistic will most likely take different interventions than are currently proposed — like waiting periods and safe storage requirements — and those are not even on the table.

While background checks might turn up people with severe mental illness who have been prone to violence, gun suicides are often committed by people whose history doesn’t suggest a serious problem. In studies, a quarter to a third of those who killed themselves were not in contact with a psychiatrist at the time of death, and the majority were not on psychiatric medicines. “The first time the family may know of the distress is when they kill themselves,” said Dr. David Gunnell, a suicide epidemiologist at the University of Bristol in England. There may be no red flags and little forethought. To carry out a campus killing rampage, perpetrators collect weapons, identify victims and select locations. In contrast, suicides are often solitary, impulsive acts, experts say.

That is why a cornerstone of suicide prevention is simple: “restricting access to common and particularly lethal means for everyone — we know that’s effective,” said Dan Reidenberg, executive director of SAVE (Suicide Awareness and Voices of Education), a national suicide prevention group.

That means different things in different places. In Britain, suicide prevention efforts in the late 1990s involved banning the sales of large bottles of paracetamol (known as Tylenol in the United States), which had been used in tens of thousands of suicide attempts each year. When I was reporting from China a decade ago, rural officials responded to an epidemic of suicide among women by restricting pesticide sales.

In the United States, we build barriers on bridges, but have fewer barriers to the quick access to guns: “In the U.S. one of the most straightforward things to do to prevent suicide is to make firearms less accessible,” Dr. Gunnell said. The Lewiecki family believes that Kerry might well be alive if there had been a waiting period before purchase in Oregon. Studies suggest that far fewer American teenagers would commit suicide if gun owners were required to use trigger locks. Seventy-five percent of the guns used in youth suicides and unintentional injuries were accessible in the home or the home of a friend.

The entire story is here.

Friday, February 22, 2013

To Reduce Suicide Rates, New Focus Turns to Guns

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
The New York Times
Published: February 13, 2013

Craig Reichert found his son’s body on a winter morning, lying on the floor as if he were napping with his great-uncle’s pistol under his knee. The 911 dispatcher told him to administer CPR, but Mr. Reichert, who has had emergency training, told her it was too late. His son, Kameron, 17, was already cold to the touch.

Guns are like a grandmother’s diamonds in the Reichert family, heirlooms that carry memory and tradition. They are used on the occasional hunting trip, but most days they are stored, forgotten, under a bed. So when Kameron used one on himself, his parents were as shocked as they were heartbroken.

“I beat myself up quite a bit over not having a gun safe or something to put them in,” Mr. Reichert said. But he said even if he had had one, “There would have been two people in the house with the combination, him and me.”

The gun debate has focused on mass shootings and assault weapons since the schoolhouse massacre in Newtown, Conn., but far more Americans die by turning guns on themselves. Nearly 20,000 of the 30,000 deaths from guns in the United States in 2010 were suicides, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national suicide rate has climbed by 12 percent since 2003, and suicide is the third-leading cause of death for teenagers.

Guns are particularly lethal. Suicidal acts with guns are fatal in 85 percent of cases, while those with pills are fatal in just 2 percent of cases, according to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.

The entire story is here.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Measure would strengthen mental health-care system

By Brady Dennis and Paul Kane,
The bill would put in place standards for about 2,000 “federally qualified” community behavioral health centers, requiring them to provide such services as substance abuse treatment and 24-hour crisis care.

In return, facilities meeting criteria would be able to bill Medicaid for their services — a change intended to open the door to treatment for many more people and one that is estimated to cost about $1 billion over the next decade.

“There is an important gap here,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), one of the bill’s main sponsors. She warned that too many people receive inadequate or no treatment and are at risk of their problems becoming more dangerous.

Sen. Roy Blunt (Mo.), the lead GOP sponsor of the measure, cited his state’s work in providing community health centers but also said that the recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., spotlighted shortcomings in mental health care that demand attention.

“We have a moment that works, and we have a model that works,” he said.

Additional Republican co-sponsors include Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Susan Collins (Maine). Other Democrats backing the legislation include Sens. Jack Reed (R.I.), Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.) and Barbara Boxer (Calif.).

The entire article is here.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Accused gunman's doctor, university face lawsuits

By Jim Spellman,
CNN
Originally published January 17, 2013


The university psychiatrist who treated the accused gunman in last year's deadly Colorado theater rampage could face more than a dozen lawsuits that blame her and the school for not properly handling James Holmes' treatment.

At least 14 people have filed legal documents indicating they are planning to sue the University of Colorado Denver and Dr. Lynne Fenton for negligence.

Holmes, 25, was a doctoral student in neuroscience at the university.

Fenton has testified that her contact with Holmes ended on June 11, more than a month before he allegedly walked into a crowded movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and opened fire, killing 12 people and wounding 58 others during a screening of the new Batman film.

She said she later contacted campus police because she was "so concerned" about what happened during her last meeting with him, but she declined to detail what bothered her.

The entire story is here.