Taking a real risk here. Lets talk mental illness.

General General Discussion
1

With today’s tragedy the issue of mental illness is being brought up. I have seen Prozac thrown around on here and on facebook.
People with mental illness should not have guns.
Why aren’t we screening these people.
Etc.
Etc.

I am Kevin Welz. I have trained with many people on this site. I enjoy firearms and the shooting sports. I own AR15s, I own Pistols, I own body armor. I also suffer from Depression. I take Prozac. Not to keep me from killing others, but to just keep myself more level.

Never at any point in my life have I wanted to take another life. But to hear others tell it, anyone who suffers from depression is a killer waiting to snap.

We are not

Yes we need help sometimes dealing with all that is going on in our loves. My wife is very ill so both of us are missing work. Money is non existent, bills are stacking up. There are family issues beyond this. My work is trying to force me to quit. Yeah I need help coping. So I take meds and I have a professional I speak with.

I get the feeling that people like me are about to have our rights taken away completely. And I fear that the firearms community as a whole will support this move.

2

I risk offending you with this post, and that is not my intent.

I do believe it is relevant to your cause.

My bias is that I do not like the medical profession. Individual doctors may be as honest as the day is long, but as an industry–and it is an industry–it is more about making money than treating people.

I ask you to consider this article as evidence that you have been programmed to depend on people that are treating your for their interests and not yours:

http://www.naturalnews.com/038348_psychiatry_quackery_medical_hoax.html

There are no mental illnesses or disorders. There never have been.

There are people with problems, there are people who suffer, there are people who are in desperate circumstances, there are people who have severe nutritional deficiencies, there are people who have been poisoned by various chemicals, there are people who have been abused and ignored, there are people who have been told there is something wrong with them, there are people who are different and can’t deal with the conforming androids in their midst, but there are no mental disorders.

There is not a single diagnostic test for any so-called mental disorder. Never has been. No blood test, no urine test, no saliva test, no brain scan, no genetic test. No science

The drugs are brain poisons. If you really want to know the truth about the drugs, go to breggin.com and read everything Dr. Peter Breggin has ever written about the drugs. He covers the whole slimy waterfront.

There is some horrendous handwriting on wall. Believe me. You can see it all around you if you look. The shrinks are treating younger and younger children with the brain poisons, every day. They’re diagnosing children who are practically toddlers and they’re drugging them. They’re ripping their brains.

3

I have to disagree, mental disorders exist. My father is severly bi-polar due to horrible unspeakable things that were done to him by his family during his childhood. I grew up with him, I know firsthand what a mental disorder can do to a person and how it can make them act and how it can ruin a family. Life was hard growing up because of his issues.

That said he is now on bipolar medicine and he is no where close to the man he was when I was growing up. There are true mental disorders and there is true medicine to help.

Good god talk about typos!!! I’ll correct them.

4

I blame the Obama Economy.

20-somethings bored in their parent’s basement, playing Call of Duty all day long, instead of working for a living like I was 25 years ago.

The frustration of voting for a LOSER… twice… is starting to close in on them… :o

5

Thank you for posting that Kevin.

I think though that what I normally read on the internet needs taken with a grain of salt. Its too easy to pretend to be stronger, smarter, better than we are and way too easy to get into group think and back patting extremist notions. I think if you really meet and speak with people they are often much more personal, understanding, and compassionate than their posts would lead you to believe. Who doesnt know someone who has been sick, depressed, suffered from addictions, and touched their lives? If not themselves than a loved one or friend.

6

Look at how many people are on Pyschotropic drugs and how much of it is water systems around the U.S…

Now go read some of the side effects of said drugs. Awesome.

7

I’m no professional in this field so my opinions are those of a doofus for lack of better word. Have a degree is secondary Ed and my wife is an active teacher so my experiences are more related to ADD than anything.

I believe that there are mental health issues, just cause you can’t take a piss test or blood draw to prove it doesn’t mean there aren’t true issues needing help. With that states I also believe that we have way too many doctors out there who see the little pills as candy. Having been around kids you’d be surprised at how many doctors hand out Ritalin like candy. Little to no diagnosis, just a blanket questionnaire that I would have failed as an adult, much less a kid who is for the first time forced to follow set rules cause mommy and daddy let them run around the house like a crazy person for the first 5 years of their lives. Rarely do they also follow up with counseling to see if they can develop coping skills or self control. I have family members who are/were on Prozac or Lexapro with no counseling what so ever to help them cope with the issues that lead to the need for mess to begin with.

With the kinds of side effects that these mood altering drugs have IMO there MUST be constant follow up to insure that the drugs are being taken. Going cold turkey off these things is generally bad juju. There also must be constant follow up to insure the drugs are still working as intended. In a lot of cases this does not happen. The drugs are dispensed and then the doctor trusts that the patient is taking the drugs.

I don’t know what the solution is, but I definitely don’t want to see decent responsible people (medicated or not) loose their rights.

8

My father was bi-polar and suffered from depression, much of it stemming from a brain injury he received from a car accident that kept him from sleeping, and thus being able to provide for us. Ambien, Prozac, etc all helped to keep him balanced, and towards the end of his life we had a great relationship. He was a gun owner, and never killed anyone.

I dont know what the answer here is, I cant wrap my head around any of this.

9

You shouldnt have to wrap your head around it.

You cannot reason with insanity. You cannot reason with evil.

10

I think this sums it up well. I wish people understood the difference between normal mental illness and evil…

11

My thoughts as well. Mental illness is real. For some people, drugs help. For others, drugs do nothing or make it worse. Since psych drugs became common, much of the real analysis and treatment has just disappeared, so you have tons of people on psych drugs, many of them still totally crazy, getting little monitoring. You also have people who had just ordinary sadness before getting drugs, then got prescribed something to “fix” them and are more screwed up than they would have been without any “treatment.”

12

X-ring. How many of these teen/twenty somthing shooters took Methylphenidate (Ritalin) their whole life?

13

Thanks Kevin for the courage to bring up the topic here.

It seems like to me the issue is that if someone is on these medications they are under the care of a doctor. To me the question is how do we get those professionals to better stop these people before they break with out trampling people’s rights or preventing people from getting help.

14

there is not a single mental disease or defect contained within the DSM IV that outlines an inherent need to take the lives of innocent children…

we are talking evil… not mental disease or defect…

mental disease is not an excuse for committing acts that in their very nature are to be considered pure evil and out of the scope of predictability of human behavior…

these individuals would be better predicted/diagnosed using Chaos Theory Mathematics than using psychoanlysis

15

It boils down to freedom, or not.

What part of “…shall not be infringed…” is difficult to comprehend folks?

If for one second I believe that a person would unjustly have their God given rights removed, in error, I would sooner let 100 people with depression, taking Prozac, have an AR. Freedom is not free.

The problem is that we have a fundamental problem with doing what we need to do to actually be secure.

If you do not want a school to get shot up again, you do not attempt to do things that make you feel like it won’t be shot up again. You secure it against being shot up again, and failing that, you have one or two folks there to try and stop it if the first level of security fails.

Even doing that may fail, you have to understand that if you want to have freedom, freedom may come with costs.

A school got shot up, and we are still lauding our awesome off-site reactionary capabilities. They get there fast, but still take time to react, and people still die. Put them on-site, hire private security if you must, real guys with real guns, and real training.

If we can afford $100k/yr translators for Farsi, or Pashto, or whatever other oddball language, and four executive assistants to the the four vice principals we can certainly afford a two man team at $60k/yr/man/school.

A high profile jewelry store protects insured items like diamonds against theft with a guard, or two, per location. Those diamonds are covered for loss – our kids aren’t. I will happily pay a higher tax rate if that security model is in place RFN.

16

First, Kevin it takes a lot of courage to confront this issue the way you did. Few people have the self-confidence to do that.

Now, I’d like to point out that depression has about as much to do with these shootings as cancer or heart disease. There is NO CONVINCING EVIDENCE that any of these mass murderers committed their heinous acts due to a mood disorder (i.e. depression or bipolar). Do defense attornies like to blame a disease for their client’s actions? Sure, and people like Kevin pay the price. Yes, some might have been on anti-depressants or even anti-psychotics, but trying to associate these medications to mass murder is just not supported by the science. While people with mood disorders are at higher risk for suicide, there is no evidence that people with isolated mood disorders pose a greater risk to society than the regular population. On the other hand, street drugs and excessive alcohol use has a much stronger association with violence than any antidepressant.

The most convincing evidence is that these criminals committed acts of violence due to personality disorders. A personality disorder is an abnormal pattern of thinking about the world. While unhealthy, they are not mental illnesses like mood or affective disorders, and they do not respond to medications. There are many types of personality disorders, but a recurrent theme among criminals is the antisocial personality disorder. These are basically assholes who do not respect the rights of others and tend to abuse substances. Our society is full of them, and there is very little you can do to treat them. My personal theory of how this particular disorder develops goes back to a nanny state, over-indulgent, and violent society that is very much substance dependent (think pot, narcotics, cocaine, meth, and benzos) for dealing with the realities of life.

17

While Im not sure if this guy was on prescription drugs or not I think there are enough people taking this stuff that even if .001% have a bad reaction, snap, and take people out we need to be putting A LOT more responsibility on the medical field on how they are taking care of their patients.

My wife is diagnosed bi-polar 2, anxiety, depression, ect. You know what her prescibed treatment is? Her doctor, who only takes cash/credit, gave her a script for some stuff and said come back in a month.

All those doctors want to do is see someone for 10 minutes, write out that months script, and move on to the next person. Over the years she has been to several doctors and they all operate like this. I personally think the mental health profession is a fucking disgrace and a joke. This bitch my wife see’s didn’t want to write out a prescription over the phone when 1. we didn’t have $75 dollars for the monthly visit on the day of her appointment and 2. my wife was going to run out of pills, and suddenly stopping them can lead to life threatening conditions. So this ‘doctor’ wanted to hold my wife, her patient, hostage with life threatening repercussions over 75 bucks we told her we would pay in a couple days. She did end up doing an over the phone refill but my wife was basically begging over the phone.

This is more about making money, and shoving pills down people’s throats than it is about treating people, and reducing the risk some people with mental health issues present to the public at large. The trend I’ve seen, not just from my wife but family and friends, is you get about 10 minutes of face to face time, a prescription for some serious medications, and sent out back into the world. Im not saying someone who says they are depressed is to be immediately rushed into a mental hospital and locked up but I just don’t think our current method, as a society, is even close to adequate to correctly dealing with mentally ill people. We can spent 1.5+ trillion on old people but practically nothing on this subject.

Aside from the mental health community the family of people with mental health issues need to be honest with themselves, and if your spouse, a parent, sibling, child (ect) have a mental condition it’s YOUR responsibility to be monitoring them, and if you need to get them committed you need to swallow your emotions for a minute and get that person the help they need. Aside from the public (which includes a class full of kindergartners :() it very may well be YOU that gets shot by your own loved one and YOUR guns used on a bunch of innocent little kids and people afterwards.

And you people who deny mental illness are friggen joke. Just STFU. :mad:

18

Kevin We all struggle with things, glad you posted this. Very positive and respectful responses by everyone. I only have experience with stress related illness, first with my grandfather and my uncles now with myself and those that I served with.

I concur with everyone, this can and should in no way be used as any sort of reasoning behind this persons actions. PURE EVIL THROUGH AND THROUGH!

I like what was said by SHIVAN
“you have to understand that if you want to have freedom, freedom may come with costs”

19

1+ to Belmont on how a lot of doctors behave.

One of the problems with the mental health “profession” is their inability to accept the FACT that their understanding of the human psyche is equivalent to my 7 year olds understanding of particle physics. It’s hard to charge someone $200/hr when you have to tell them to don’t have a clue and can’t guarantee their $$ is well spent. But they don’t mind signing scripts.

Seems like the Medical-Industrial-Complex is about as bad as the Military-industrial one.

I wonder how much negative long term effect psychotropics have on society. Thinking along the lines of people not developing coping skills cause they pop a pill instead?

Not suggesting that people out there don’t need help and that there aren’t good uses for the mess, just wondering about the other segment who get stuck with quacks who don’t follow up and continue trying to help patients

20

Kevin I can’t promise that your fears aren’t well founded, veterans at this very moment, men & women who answered the call, have been singled out for just such special treatment, for no greater reason then that they sought help for PTSD. In many cases they have been summarily stripped of their 2nd amendment rights!

At any rate, I am a former mental health professional, I was a psychiatric RN for a dozen years, later a certified chemical dependency counselor. I worked almost exclusively with adolscents with dual disability disorders. I would venture the opinion, that todays murderous rampage was not likely the by-product of a depression, untreated or otherwise. I think as details emerge, this killer will be revealed as a psychopath, his target/motivation was his mother, and everything that she loved.