So what is your point exactly?
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That more of the wealth which the workers create using natural resources, should be directed toward care for people with mental health problems. Granted, living in a class dominated society where dominance and submission is considered
the norm and especially one where the credo, "Hooray for me, devil take the hindmost" reigns, does drive a lot of people looney. Adding commodified lethal weaponry to the mix, doesn't help matters one little bit; although packing heat does make those with genuine fears about living in such a dog eat dog culture feel less fearful.
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In light of the Tucson tragedy, it would be nice to see the mental health system, or what's left of it, come up for real discussion, including serious consideration of vastly expanding mental health services so that people like Loughner's parents or his philosophy professor or his algebra teacher could have
actually gotten him the help he needed before he killed someone. (In the past year, Arizona cut $36 million from its mental health programs, nearly 40 percent
of its budget.) If nothing else, maybe it's time for some public service announcements about the symptoms of schizophrenia—how to distinguish them from ordinary teen angst or political passion, and how to intervene. Lots of research now shows that the longer someone with a brain disease remains untreated, the more severe their dangerous delusions are likely to become. Yet most people go years before such disases are properly diagnosed. Early intervention could save a whole lot of lives.
Untreated serious mental illness is a huge risk factor for violent crime, particularly among those released from mental hospitals. A 1992 study by Dr. Henry Steadman, now the chair of the national advisory board of the Center for Mental Health Services & Criminal Justice Research, found that 27 percent of released patients reported having engaged in at least one violent act within four months of being discharged. Those findings mirror older research suggesting that discharged patients had arrest rates for violent crimes 10 times that of the general population. Another study, published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2002, found that about 14 percent of adults with severe mental illness (schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) had been violent within the previous year. Not surprisingly, then, 16 percent of jail inmates are estimated to be mentally ill, according to the Justice Department—some 300,000 people, or four times the number who are in mental hospitals today in the United States.
full: http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/01/jared-loughner-tucson-mental-health-reform
************************************************************************ This is a political issue which the conservatives don't want you to notice. They
are purposefully underfunding mental health at the public level so that they and
their rich pals can keep more money from the tax assessor. Saint Ronald was only
in it for the money and so his conservative pals backed him in cutting funding for mental health, starting the ball rolling. And now we have this situation in California and elsewhere: ****************************** Another thing that happened then was Frank Lanterman, who drafted the law, was a
conservative legislator from Pasadena, and he had ties to John Birch Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, very, very conservative organisations. And
he said and those around him said that psychiatric hospitals were Marxist tools,
that basically that the people in hospitals were political prisoners and so there was under a cry of libertarianism, and what I would call political cover of libertarianism said, 'Let these poor people go.' So. But really what the fiscal - the fiscal side was driving it as well, that essentially that there is a lot of money to be saved by closing the state hospitals. 1960 there's half a million people in state hospitals in the United States, 1980 there's 100,000. So
basically this was under the cover of libertarianism, there was a fiscal drive to actually empty out the state hospitals as well. So you have really an arch-conservative/libertarian from Southern California. His co-author, Nicholas Petris from Oakland, describing the literature as 'ultra
liberal', and he was more of the school of thought that grew up under The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz, RD Laing The Divided Self, that there is a whole groundswell on the left saying that mental illness was a myth and that these are just kind of misunderstood, eccentric, poor characters and we should just let them go. And so you had far right, far left, and then Short was just sort of thrown in at the end, I can't tell you much about him except his first name was Alan. So Lanterman, Petris, Short, they had this sort of unholy, political alliance, and so this law was crafted.
full: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2011/3082695.htm#transcript
For the works! Mike B)
*********************************************************************** Equal political power between men and women. Abolition of wage-labour and commodity production with distribution of goods and services based on useful labour time. Grassroots democracy. http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/