An answer to what is mental health appeared on January 16th in President Obama’s proposals to reduce gun violence in the United States. It could strongly be argued it is the wrong answer.
First he calls for closing background check loopholes to try to keep guns out of dangerous hands and banning military style assault weapons and high capacity magazines.
But guns, rifles and assault weapons are inanimate objects that don’t jump up and kill students by themselves. These objects are wielded and made to kill by a human being acting under some uncontrollable emotional state or hidden influence such as psychiatric drugs.
The President’s plan then addresses the question of mental health.
Under “Making Schools Safer” he calls for putting up to 1,000 new school resource officers and school counselors on the job: The program would give $150 million to school districts and law enforcement agencies to hire school resource officers, school psychologists, social workers, and counselors.
Under “Improving Mental Health Services” President Obama made this remarkable statement, “We are going to need to work on making access to mental health care as easy as access to a gun.”
In fact the mental health issues of these killers had been identified early, they had been given standard mental health treatment – psychiatric drugs – and then gone on to commit these horrible murders.
Psychiatric medication has been well documented as the real cause of most of these shooting incidents.
David Kupelian is an award-winning journalist and author of the best-selling books, How Evil Works and The Marketing of Evil.
He writes, “As I documented in “How Evil Works,” it is simply indisputable that most perpetrators of school shootings and similar mass murders in our modern era were either on – or just recently coming off of – psychiatric medications”
His book lists well known cases and the details of the psychiatric drugs taken by the killers. Here are a few of his many examples:
- Columbine mass-killer Eric Harris was taking Luvox –a modern and widely prescribed type of antidepressant drug when he and fellow student Dylan Klebold killed 12 and wounded 24 others in a school shooting.
- Patrick Purdy who went on a schoolyard shooting rampage in Stockton, Calif., in 1989, murdered five children and wounded 30, had been on Amitriptyline, an antidepressant, as well as the antipsychotic drug Thorazine.
- Kip Kinkel, 15, murdered his parents in 1998 and the next day went to his school, and opened fire on his classmates, killing two and wounding 22 others. He had been prescribed both Prozac and Ritalin.
- In 2005, 16-year-old Jeff Weise, living on Minnesota’s Red Lake Indian Reservation, shot and killed nine people and wounded five others before killing himself. Weise had been taking Prozac.
- 47-year-old Joseph T. Wesbecker, just a month after he began taking Prozac in 1989, shot 20 workers at Standard Gravure Corp. in Louisville, Ky., killing nine.
Despite such evidence, the drug companies quietly settle lawsuits out of court and continue to sell the same drugs over and over.
The President has answered what is mental health by calling for more of the same treatment to be made available.
“Three-quarters of mental illnesses appear by the age of 24, yet less than half of children with diagnosable mental health problems receive treatment. And several recent mass shootings, including those at Newtown, Tucson, Aurora, and Virginia Tech, were perpetrated by students or other young people.”
He fails to mention the psychiatric drugs given to these young people!
The President wants to reach 750,000 more young people with his proposed Project AWARE which calls for training teachers and other adults who regularly interact with students to recognize young people who need help and ensure they are referred to mental health services.
Of course the “services” are psychiatric drugs handed out to school kids funneled into this mental health treatment by their teachers, school counselors and fellow students.
His plan continues with a proposal to fund and train 5,000 more social workers, counselors, psychologists, and other mental health professionals.
It is ironic that while the media ignores the question of whether the Sandy Hook school massacre shooter had been taking psychiatric drugs, the President of the United States has looked to guns as the problem and has called for more of the same mental health care that has led to so many of these tragedies.
It is also ironic that on the same day of the President’s proposals, “The Denver Post” reported that a lawsuit was filed by the widow of a man killed in the Century Aurora 16 theater shooting in July 2012. She is suing Dr. Lynne Fenton the University of Colorado psychiatrist who had been treating the shooter and five other unnamed defendants.
Such lawsuits may one day lead to banning psychiatric drugs, an end to mass killings and answering what is mental health.