Recently however I've begun to see just how truthful that might actually be. I spent 4 days in a crisis center because I foolishly tried to commit twice. If you've read earlier blogs you will know why. I had hoped that this crisis center would put me back together again like Humpty Dumpty but I soon realized it was only a churn and burn facility. They gave us handouts and goals for the day and we were always in some group or another. I was the only one who had tried suicide all by itself, there were others there that tried to do it while on a drunken binge, there were others who had just lost a loved one and did a handful of pain meds and booze.....there were even people that just got too drunk and fell over into a coffee table gouging an eye. we were all the same yet not the same. We were there because we had all screamed for help. And we found help in each other. But at the end of the day the staff's goal was to send 2 home and take in 3 more. The shrink at this facility asked me two simple questions: "do you still feel suicidal? Do you want to hurt anyone else? The answer was no to both and I went home with in the hour.
Which brings me to the point of this blog. In recent news reports I've been seeing that the country is still hotly divided by gun control vs health care for the mentally ill. The problem has now been shifted to making it harder for someone like Jerrold Loughner to get guns. Clearly he was a nut job but he was still able to legally purchase guns. So the real question should be how do we weed out the nut jobs from everyone else? I heard on one news report that a very small fraction of mental health care facilities ever report to the state or Federal agencies the people that need special watching over! The scary part for me is that if all crisis centers are over crowded and have to roll the dice on the lesser of two evils then there simply is no way to keep society safe. I used my time there to get my feet back under myself but I learned very quickly what the right answers were, what the rules were. But just what would happen if I was a another Loughner? Just smart enough to play the game and get out but still very angry at society, at the man. Clearly this happens not just in Arizona or Connecticut or Colorado.....it is a country wide epidemic! Somehow we've missed the warning signs or worse yet we ignored the warning signs. Even more alarming is that the facilities designed to house people like Loughner are simply overwhelmed, over crowded and under staffed. So how do we handle it?
One possible solution could include the ability for police officers to obtain anyone suspected of being mentally unfit. STORY HERE This gives the officers more freedom but also lends to more police violence like we've seen in recent years and creates a bigger mess within society. So really? What do we do about this?
I leave you with this......I read a book once, probably something that Stephen King wrote in where humanity had been equipped with tiny micro chips...very similar to those we inject into our favorite pets so they can never be lost or stolen. Tis micro chips contain everything about that particular human: height, age, weight, criminal background, bank account information, family members, blood type. What if we adopted something like that for our mentally unfit members of society? Since keeping them housed in an asylum someone doesn't seem to work ( refer to PennHurst, Waverly Hills etc.) then a GPS type device can better monitor the Loughnor's of this world and perhaps stop mass shootings?? Sure, it sounds like spooky, some might even think it's an "envasion of privacy" but I'd much rather have something like that in place than see another school full of 1st graders gunned down. I'd rather have that type of Science Fiction in place than see another movie theater full of movie goers gunned down.......It's just possible that society has come to this point, yes?
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