Speaker Ryan sees mentally ill at root of all mass shootings

[HereSince1628]

Expect new and better list keeping...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/paul-ryan-mental-health-guns_565dc89de4b08e945fec9746

Paul Ryan Pushes Mental Health Reform Instead Of Gun Laws After Colorado Shooting

WASHINGTON -- The priority of Congress after the deadly shooting at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado over Thanksgiving weekend should be to fix the nation’s mental health system, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) argued Tuesday.

Speaking to reporters after meeting with his members, Ryan offered his condolences to the families of the three people killed and nine injured in Colorado Springs on Friday, when a shooter opened fire inside the women's health clinic.

“What happened is appalling, and justice should be swift,” Ryan said. “Clearly we can do more.”

As far as what more Congress could do, Ryan was not definitive, but he did not call for looking at some of the more popular measures proposed in Congress, such as beefing up background checks.

He said the “common denominator” in all the nation’s frequent mass shootings is mental illness.

[LiberalArkie]

1. So I wonder if he will propose a psychiatric evaluation before one can purchase a

weapon? I think that would work out very well.

[HereSince1628]

2. What I expect is broader collection of mental health records

More reporting requirements for a broader range of circumstances.

The NRA has everyone convinced that guns don't kill but the monsters among us pull triggers. By monsters among us, Ryan and Wayne LaPierre don't mean radicalized conservative vigilantes incited to violence by comments of rw presidential primary candidates or talk radio.

It's unlikely that psychiatric evaluations prior to gun purchase would be part of it. As pointed out elsewhere, the logistics would overwhelm the psychiatric industry and ask them to do a job that they aren't trained to do--and for which science/technology do not exit. No psychiatric discipline can accurately predict which individuals will murder other people.

Ryan is mostly doing what politicians do...finding a scapegoat to protect campaign donations.

[LiberalArkie]

3. I think though that when someone is evaluated that looks batshit crazy, it might

be easy. Someone getting an evaluation that is clean and neat shouldn't set off any bells. When I was younger I used to work radio at a hospital er on weekends. When some people walked in I immediately radioed for security before they even entered. Eyes wide open, head jerking around, looking behind them all the time. You just knew it would be an interesting night. But they were ok to buy a gun probably. And we never knew if they had one or not.

[HereSince1628]

4. You are of course free to think whatever you wish.

The APA was pretty specific about it's objections to enhanced reporting requirements of New York's SAFE Act. And the inability to accurately predict individiuals who would commit gun violence was among their objections.

There are something near 17 million gun sales per year that go through the NICs background check, the number of sales/transfer that take place beyond that is unknown.

For the sake of argument lets say only 17 million gun sales would be connected to 'psychiatric evaluations', and let's ignore that there is no evaluation intended to determine if a person will commit gun violence at a future time. And lets just say, that evaluation could be made, meaningfully, in one visit.

In 52 weeks that would require an additional 327,000 psychiatric appointments to be met per week. Each evaluation takes not only an interview, but possibly personality test batteries, and interviews and test results would require evalution, and a written report, and then reporting to NICs or other national databse. All that effort These require time, time that can't be given to other patients...patients that are seeking help because they are ill, not merely jumping through a regulatory hoop. Such a "reform" in the psychiatric industry would add significant burden on the US psychiatric industry.

And what would such an evaluation really mean? Mental illness can strike at any age, even if incidence rates for many illness peak among people from 15-30 years of age. Some things, like depression, anxiety and adjustment disorders (things associated with 'going postal) have significant -social/environmental- components and it can't be known when if ever in a person's life sufficient contextual distress will occur
to result in psychological and behavioral dysfunction. Gun deaths from suicide among men, which have about an 80% association with mental illness increase with age.

Do we need gun permits that expires so that the person can be regularly re-evaluated, say annually? If so, that 17 million gun ownership related psych-exam number per year would quickly grow toward the -70 million legal gun owners in the nation needing exams. This sort of added effort within the American mental health industry wouldn't help it work better, it would move toward overwhelming it...or perhaps more likely...lead to the production of evaluations not worth the computer memory they are stored on.