Quote:
Originally Posted by molson
So the "I am Adam Lanza's Mother" lady and her son live right here in Boise. I'm sure there's kids like that in every town, at every school, but still, local parents have to be less than psyched about that. What would you do if you knew that kid went to your child's school?
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Which is why I think that the mental health policy angle is going to be the more difficult discussion (and why fewer people want to tackle it). The gun control debate feels cartoonish, showy, and ultimately inconclusive where positions won't move so nothing will change.
The mental health policy issues have a lot of nuance to them, and the nuances can be grasped by more Americans. Not only are mental-health diagnoses, especially in children, more talked about; many of the issues mirror general health policy and privacy issues already at the fore. To think of a few:
- If we want comprehensive mental health coverage, how are we going to pay for it?
- If policy or public sentiment changes, how will a mental health diagnosis impact me or my children from a patient privacy perspective? Will there be more or less social stigma? A loss in earnings potential above and beyond what is brought by the condition itself?
- If there will be wholesale policy changes and a potential return to involuntary commitment, what will the threshold for "danger to society" be? What are the implications to the country from a cost perspective? What are the implications to the mentally ill (especially for those on the cusp of such a threshold) from a rights perspective?
- Etc.
The nuances remind me of Ronald Reagan's oft-cited decision to "close down the mental hospitals and let them run loose on the streets". Whereas there is much truth to Reagan's desire to cut social/health program expenditures, in often heartbreaking ways; also remember that this decision had a lot of support from the patients-rights community who objected to a lot of the forced/involuntary commitment policies that were in place at the time.