Gordon Humphrey isn’t a household name. But perhaps he should be. Humphrey, formerly a conservative Republican senator from the Granite State who served for twelve years on the Senate Armed Services Committee, resigned in protest from the Republican Party the day after the 2016 general election. In early August, Mr. Humphrey emerged from his home in Chichester, New Hampshire, to thrust himself into the center of the debate on Donald Trump’s fitness to serve as president.

On August 9, 2017, after listening to Donald Trump’s blustering on North Korea, Humphrey sent scathing letters to Representatives Ann McLane Kuster and Carol Shea-Porter, as well as to U.S. Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan outlining the reasons why members of the New Hampshire congressional delegation should support congressional bill H.R. 1987.

H.R. 1987 proposes to establish an Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity. The commission would be charged with determining whether the president is “mentally or physically unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office of president” and whether he should be removed from the duties of the presidency under the 25^th Amendment to the Constitution. To date, H.R. 1987 has attracted the co-sponsorship of twenty-one House Democrats and been referred to the House Judiciary Committee. There the bill is expected to languish without coming to a vote. Not surprisingly, not a single Republican has shown the courage or patriotism to sign on, even though signs of Trump’s mental instability continue to mount.

Following release of his letter, Humphrey spoke candidly with New Hampshire Public Radio’s Peter Biello about why he felt compelled to speak out. Calling Trump delusional, sociopathic, and a sick psyche with no sense of shame or guilt, Humphrey observes during the interview that there is “a mountain of empirical evidence that this president is not well.” Listen to the full interview here and read Humphrey’s letter below.

Dear Representative Kuster:

President Trump’s threat to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea is like pouring gasoline on a fire. It’s crazy. Donald Trump is impaired by a seriously sick psyche. His sick mind and reckless conduct could consume the lives of millions. The threat of nuclear war is steeply on the rise.

You must not take comfort in the system of checks and balances. The president alone has the authority to launch nuclear weapons, the only restraint being the advice of senior advisers who might be present at the time of crisis, and Donald Trump has shown repeated contempt for informed and wise counsel. He is sick of mind, impetuous, arrogant, belligerent and dangerous.

Donald Trump should be relieved of the powers of the presidency at the earliest date. I urge you to support HR 1987, the Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity Act, which would establish a commission to determine whether the president is mentally fit. I have asked Rep. Shea-Porter to do the same and have asked Sens. Shaheen and Hassan to lead an effort in the Senate.

HR 1987 is consistent with the intent and the wording of the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Either the Cabinet or a body created by Congress, may find the president unfit for reasons of health, whereupon his powers are transferred to the vice president.

Serious crises are bearing down on us. We cannot leave our national security and our families’ safety in the hands of a president whose poor judgment, belligerence, vindictiveness and reckless impetuosity constitute an indictment of his mental health.

Donald Trump is seriously sick. He is dangerous. As a citizen, a former U.S. senator and 12-year member of the Armed Services Committee, I urge you to act at once. This is an emergency.

Regards,

GORDON HUMPHREY

Chichester

The post Gordon Humphrey: A lone voice in the Trump wilderness appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It’s possible that Donald Trump can run away from his Charlottesville problems by trying to be commander-in-chief and uttering a policy about Afghanistan. What he cannot run away from, unless he receives some miraculous treatment for narcissistic tendencies, is the mental health baggage that he carries with him.

While it is true that all of us make decisions based on our psychological make-up, it would be thoroughly confusing and unworkable for us to base everyone’s judgment calls on their psychological make-up. An extension of this is that we cannot assess policy decisions on the psychological profiles of those who make them.

But when someone is as detached from reality as Donald Trump, it is essential that we put psychology first and policy assessments second. What took place in his mind to spur him to present to the country and the world a new program of adding 3,900 uncounted troops to Afghanistan? What makes him think that if he chooses a strategy that is remarkably similar to the one that he consistently disparaged and berated from Barack Obama, that he will have sudden success? It is timely that we remind ourselves that one definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Isn’t that what Trump is doing in Afghanistan?

He said,

We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities. Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on. America’s enemies never know our plans or believe they can wait us out.

He thinks this is new, perhaps because in style it varies from what Barack Obama did. But in substance, it is precisely what George W. Bush, Obama’s predecessor, and the man who initiated the sixteen-year-long quagmire in Afghanistan, did. The Bush-Cheney Administration went gung-ho into Afghanistan, wishing to spare no limitations on how it would try to rid the country of terrorists and to make it thoroughly inhospitable to terrorists in the future.

It may serve any United States president well to not just look back at the policies of Barack Obama or George W. Bush in trying to “conquer” Afghanistan. He won’t find success there and he won’t with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev whose late 1970s invasion into Afghanistan was a total fiasco. If you want victory in Afghanistan, then you might find some with Alexander the Great with his campaign from 330 – 323 BCE. That really wasn’t that good either,

The type of guerilla-style fighting that Alexander faced during the Afghan campaign was described centuries later by the chronicler Plutarch, who compared Afghan tribesmen to a hydra-headed monster: as soon as Alexander cut off one head, three more would grow back in its place.

In some ways, looking at Trump through the lens of his mental health issues rather than standard policy evaluations, reveals the irony in that he could have done what he previously espoused, and what no western country has done in millennia. He could have just pulled out.

Imagine if Barack Obama had tried to simply disengage from Afghanistan. It is what many Americans, including those in uniform, wanted him to do. But since Obama had never been in the military, and he was the one who called America’s presence in Iraq “a dumb war … a rash war,” his credentials were somewhat tainted for withdrawal (as opposed, for instance, to Dwight Eisenhower leading the U.S. out of Korea in 1953).

But with Trump’s psyche and his penchant for outright lying, there is no requirement that he follow reason or base decisions on evidence. That’s why he could have chosen in his August 21, 2017 speech to pull the United States out of Afghanistan. It simply would have been “Trumpian.”

But for whatever reason, he didn’t. And now we’ll all have to pay the price. Whether the military actually gave him the advice that he ascribed to them, they had better keep a close eye on him. The idea of Donald Trump using military resources is about as scary as it can get. We can never lose sight of who he is and what he brings to the table. First and foremost, it is an illness, and that is not the correct prescription for leadership.

The post With Afghanistan, Trump cannot run away from his mental health problems appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In 1964, 1,189 psychiatrists said, “Goldwater is psychologically unfit to be president.” The reaction to that is what created the Goldwater Rule which stated, “it is unethical for psychiatrists to give a professional opinion about public figures they have not examined in person, and from whom they have not obtained consent to discuss their mental health in public statements.”

FiveThirtyEight recently revisited the issue with a Christie Aschwanden post, “’Diagnosing’ Trump Is More About Politics Than Mental Health.” This is very timely because the nature of Donald Trump, both before the 2016 election and since, is such that many people are asking WTF is going on?

Aschwanden talks about the confusion regarding the rule with three similar-sounding organizations weighing in: The American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychoanalytical Association and the American Psychological Association. It should be no wonder that three organizations are not on the same page regarding the Goldwater Rule.

Professional organizations tend to get huffy about their territory and may not always take a global view of what is going on at ground-level. In the case of Trump, it is rather clear, at the minimum, that he is rather unique. It may be that some people think that he is a very healthy person, mentally. While many Americans are absolutely repulsed by his persona, there are millions who think that he is just fine. Fine enough to be president of the world’s longest-standing democracy.

Perhaps, and only perhaps, mental health assessment should be exclusively in the purview of the professionals, but in reality, most of us engage in analysis, or at least speculation. Chances are that the conclusions we draw are more a result of our own personal nature and nurture combination than any professional training. How we express it is also a reflection of who we are.

There are those who simply say that Trump is an idiot. Others will say that he is insane.

Those who give the situation a little more reflection might say that he does not seem to be mentally fit to be president, or that he has a narcissistic disorder that precludes him from distinguishing reality from fantasy. But as those on the left say such things, there are others on the right, particularly the alt-right, who think that he has all the qualities of an outstanding leader.

It is indeed difficult to distinguish between our amateurish psychological assessments of leaders and our plain and simple cultural biases. Again, to many progressives, Trump would be the nightmare guest at any gathering that one would attend. He would suck the oxygen out of the air while hurling insults at individuals and groups alike. Essentially everything that he would have to say would be about his one favorite topic, himself and how great he is.

Those of us who believe that modesty is indeed the best policy tend to be repelled by Trump and many of his associates. But there are millions of others who cannot construct a subtle way integrate their personality, so bragging and taunting is a natural way to feel good about oneself.

If the worlds of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychology were exact sciences, it would be easier to accept the Goldwater Rule. But we all know that one mental health professional can come to Diagnosis ‘A’ while a second comes to Diagnosis ‘B’ and so on.  So, the beat goes on. We will look at one another, and particularly our leaders, in ways that reflect our own personal values and even prejudices.

My frustration with the present situation is one that is common to almost everyone walking the planet. I wish that more people agreed with me. I wish that they would see the world as I do. If they did, we would never have anyone like Trump in the White House and we would live in peace with respect for economic, social and human rights.

But obviously, that is not the way it is, for any of us. For those of us who find Trump objectionable, we must try to find effective ways to convince others. More likely, what we need is for Trump to discover new ways to offend his base in ways that does not do too much damage to the world.

We all will continue to see things as they come most naturally to us. For those of us who wonder how we can be in a world in which Donald Trump is president of the United States, maybe our best solace is that “shit happens (not a psychological term),” and hopefully it will happen in a way that will be beneficial for us personally and the world in which we live. If we’re insightful and persistent, perhaps we can help influence what happens.

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NBC Nightly News concludes most of its broadcasts with a segment that it calls “Inspiring America.” Because so much “bad news” is reported, particularly on the local news, NBC likes to include a “sunshine story” in as many broadcasts as possible.

The problem is that there seems to be just about as much sensationalizing in reporting “good news” as bad news. This was very apparently on Wednesday, July 12, when the “Inspiring America” segment was on the “new” development of American workers taking mental health days.

Here is anchor Lester Holt’s introduction to the story, both before and after the lead-in commercial:

When we come back, who hasn’t needed a mental health day? We’ll go to one company where they’re actually embracing that concept.

{Commercials}

Finally, tonight, a woman in Michigan just might’ve done more to highlight the importance of mental health in this country than anyone else recently, simply by what she told her boss when she called in sick recently. And it drew a surprising response that has touched so many others. Here’s NBC’s Kevin Tibbles with the story.

As a standalone, without context, the story might truly be a feel good. A woman who experiences depression and anxiety feels that she needs a mental health day. Instead of lying to her boss and saying that she has the flu (or some other conventionally acceptable reason), she says “I’m taking today and tomorrow to focus on my mental health. Hopefully I’ll be back next week refreshed and back to 100%.”

Hooray for her boss, Ben Congleton, and his response is indeed empathetic, “You’re already trusting people to stay home when they have the flu, trust them to stay home when they’re not mentally all there.”

The question is whether this should be news. The implication from NBC is that this was groundbreaking, the first time that an employee ever said that he/she needed a mental health day and the boss said, “Fine.” If this had occurred in the 1950s, perhaps it would have had the novelty to make it news.

But in many sectors of our society, we are more enlightened now than we were decades ago. Employees ask for and gladly receive mental health days all the time. I have been on both sides of the equation.

It is the way that many of us now can freely live our lives.

A better story by NBC would have been on those individuals in our workforce who feel that they need mental health days, but cannot openly ask for them. These individuals face the conundrum of either telling something that is not true or forcing themselves to go to work when it is not healthy for them, and perhaps not healthy for the employer as well.

Acknowledging and being sensitive to mental health issues in the workplace is something where we can all grow. In a civilized society, empathy is as key within the workplace as it is in all segments of our lives.

But the way NBC presented it, something that had never occurred before happened and they were the first to discover it. This may not have been fake news, but it certainly was hyped news, and in many ways, that can be equally destructive to our society.

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Hillary Clinton has just released a plan would treat mental health care with the same priority as physical health care. It’s a well-thought-out, comprehensive policy that deserves attention and support. And, according to some observers, it actually has a chance of becoming a reality. Unfortunately, the announcement of the plan came in the midst of the media clamor over Donald Trump’s bogus trip to Mexico and his hate-fueled immigration speech.

Clinton’s plan calls for some very important changes to the way mental health care is currently addressed in the American healthcare system, where it has long been a neglected stepchild.

In broad terms, according to the Clinton website, the plan would

Promote early diagnosis and intervention, including launching a national initiative for suicide prevention.

Integrate our nation’s mental and physical health care systems so that health care delivery focuses on the “whole person,” and significantly enhance community-based treatment

Improve criminal justice outcomes by training law enforcement officers in crisis intervention, and prioritizing treatment over jail for non-violent, low-level offenders.

Enforce mental health parity to the full extent of the law.

Improve access to housing and job opportunities.

Invest in brain and behavioral research and developing safe and effective treatments.

More specifically, the big-ticket item in Clinton’s plan is, according to the Washington Post,

…$5 billion for community health centers providing substance abuse and mental-health treatment as well as traditional medical care…To address a shortage of mental-health professionals, meanwhile, she would encourage telemedicine, among other things. Clinton also proposed pumping up the budget for basic scientific research, some of which would be diverted into studying the brain.

There’s no doubt that these priorities merit attention. According to a government study, about 1 in 5 adults — or 43.6 million people — had a mental illness in 2014, with nearly 10 million of those experiencing a serious condition, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. The same study said that 2.8 million adolescents had a major depressive episode during the past year.

Unfortunately, conventional payment systems have shortchanged mental-health care. While the Affordable Care Act [Obamacare] made some significant changes in requirements for mental health coverage,  there is much room for improvement. The good news, for example is that,since 2014, health insurance companies offering individual and small-group plans can no longer deny enrollment or charge higher premiums to people with medical histories of behavioral/mental health disorders. Also under the ACA, individual and small–group plans  are required to cover ten essential health benefits with no annual or lifetime dollar limits. Mental health and addiction treatment are among the essential health benefits. Nor can these plans offer mental-health benefits that are less favorable than the benefits for medical/surgical care.

But the National Alliance on Mental Illness published a report in 2015 detailing problems with access to behavioral health providers, and limited coverage for some brand-name drugs, particularly anti-psychotics, says healthinsurance.org. .The report also notes that health insurance companies are still more than twice as likely to deny authorization for mental health care, compared with authorization for general medical care.

Clinton’s plan, says the Washington Post, “emphasizes using the federal government’s role as a major payer in the health industry to encourage the integration of mental-health care into medical practices.”

As for practicality, Clinton’s plan is not just another pie-in-the-sky idea with no hope of implementation. The Washington Post notes that…

Congress has over the past several years put serious effort into reforming the federal government’s mental-health efforts, producing — but not yet passing — a slew of bills with bipartisan backing. This is one of the few issues on which lawmakers may be able to agree, even in a severely divided Washington, over the coming months. The House, in fact, has already passed a bill. Ideally, the Senate would pass its own reform before next year. But, if lawmakers fail to send a bill to President Obama — always a high likelihood given Congress’s slow pace — the next president should enter the policy debate, pressing for lawmakers to finally pass something.

As far as I can tell, there’s no parallel proposal from the Republican nominee, whose candidacy has been, essentially, a policy-free zone [until recently, when he doubled-down on an outrageously hateful, xenophobic immigration “plan.”]

For those of us seeking a President who has actual policy ideas designed to help people, and who is willing to do the work necessary to bring them to life, Hillary Clinton’s mental healthcare plan is very reassuring. I’m voting for the policy wonk.

The post Hillary Clinton speaks up for mental health care equality appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The candidacy of Donald Trump poses a real question about the mental health of a political figure and who can try to analyze it. His presence on the top of the Republican ticket requires us to ask whether those of us who are not trained in psychology or psychiatry have the right to try to diagnose whatever mental illness that Trump might or might not have. The question of diagnosing even extends to the professionals who spend their days making assessments, but only of patients who they have personally met.

One of the big questions for those who find Trump’s behavior to be far outside the lines of what we consider normal political conduct is whether or not it is fair to call Trump “crazy.” Former Congressman Patrick Kennedy recently penned an op-ed in the Washington Post tilled, “Stop calling Trump ‘crazy.’ It demeans those with mental illness.” Kennedy says:

Is Donald Trump experiencing a mental illness? That’s one question making the rounds these days. The answer is: I don’t know. And neither do the commentators, tweeters and psychiatrists — both licensed and armchair — who’ve diagnosed him as “crazy,” a “psychopath,” not “sane,” having “narcissistic personality disorder” and a “screw loose.”

What I do know is that we ought to stop casually throwing around terms like “crazy” in this campaign and our daily lives. The president of the American Psychiatric Association has said that even for professionals, these sorts of diagnoses, made from afar, are “unethical” and “irresponsible.” And they only serve to demean and undercut people.

He goes on to state:

“Crazy” is never uttered with compassion. I have never heard it used in the context of trying to get someone the treatment they need. When that language is commonplace, it becomes that much harder for those experiencing mental illness to openly seek treatment that works. It discriminates, in subtle and overt ways, and extends its reach into schools, workplaces and the health-care system, where we still don’t provide routine mental health exams. When we use that word the way we have, we perpetuate the dangerous, “separate and unequal” treatment of these illnesses, and continue to pretend that the brain isn’t part of the body.

Mr. Kennedy’s words are important; they cause us all to stop and think about the risks of being loose with our language about someone’s who’s mental health we might question. But we need to be careful to not become so non-judgmental of public figures that we cannot intelligently discuss a candidate’s fitness for office in areas other than positions on issues or previous experience.

Even Trump supporters say that he is a candidate unlike any other that we have previously had in American history. He is unpredictable, eccentric, contradictory, confusing, belligerent, insensitive, unapologetic, myopic – and these are all words that are acceptable to say. At some point we are required as stakeholders in our democracy to assess whether or not this man is fit to be president. If it is off-bounds to evaluate his mental health (and Patrick Kennedy makes a very good argument for this), then we must use other terms. These include his temperament, his wisdom, his critical thinking skills, his social skills, his “grace under pressure” (a term used by Patrick Kennedy’s uncle, John F. Kennedy, to describe courage).

It is Republicans who usually rail against being politically correct. Yet somewhat at their insistence, we are discouraged from questioning Trump’s state of mind. Republicans also do not like us wondering whether George W. Bush, Dan Quayle or Sarah Palin had the intelligence to hold the highest office in the land. Yet these are vital questions. If David Halberstam made a sound case in his book The Best and the Brightest that at one particular time in our history those who seemed to be the smartest among us failed keeping the U.S. out of a preventable war in the 1960s, it does not mean that we cannot question the mental and psychological bona fides of candidates for office.

Patrick Kennedy is certainly right that it is not for us to make diagnoses or to use pejorative terms like “crazy.” However, we must retain the freedom to state that someone is not intellectually or temperamentally fit to be in office. If someone asks us “why,” we don’t have to respond with a diagnosis. We simply need to point out the behavior that raises our concerns. Fortunately, Mr. Trump has made that easy for us.

The post It’s not fair to call Trump “crazy,” but … appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Bernie Sanders let the “M” word–“mental health”– slip out in the Sunday, March 6 Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan. He drew laughter at the CNN debate when he referenced the GOP slugfests as another reason to spend more on mental health programs. “We are, if elected president, going to invest a lot of money into mental health,” Sanders said. “And when you watch these Republican debates, you know why we need to invest in that.”

This is the elephant in the room. It’s the conundrum that CNN and virtually all mainstream media outlets face. Do you address the possible underlying reasons as to why the behavior in the Republican race for the White House has been so weird?

The contrast between the Sunday night Democratic debate and the Thursday night Republican debate is more than startling and stark. It pushes the envelope of how we understand our species. How can two groups of candidates, coming from reasonably similar backgrounds, conduct themselves at such vastly different developmental levels. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in the Democratic debate are near the top level of “self-actualization” in Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Republicans seem to be stuck in the bottom two levels, (1) physiological comfort, and (2) safety. American historians flatly state that it has never been like this before.

There is a maturity problem with the current Republican candidates, with the exception of John Kasich. It’s not just Donald Trump. In fact, Trump is right when he accuses Ted Cruz of constantly failing to tell the truth. And Rubio seems to be at a loss to compose himself now that he’s in the “big leagues.”

Sanders posited the question, “Do the Republican candidates have mental health issues that need to be addressed?” This is the sanitized, and far less common, version of what many non-Republicans have been asking, “Are these people crazy?”

This takes us into very dangerous territory. Who are any of us to accuse others of being crazy? How does any accuser know that he or she is not crazy? And perhaps most importantly, is the word “crazy” to pejorative for anyone to use?

Bernie Sanders had the good sense to use the proper language regarding the bizarre behavior of the Republican candidates. He raised the issue of mental health. And if that issue is to be raised about the candidates, does it not follow that it also should be raised about those who support the candidates?

Like many progressives, or more accurately, like many people, I have had my own issues with mental health. Depression and anxiety have episodically presented difficult challenges. Fortunately, I have not denied the existence of these challenges, and I have also been able to receive important help from others. I firmly believe that mental health issues should be part of our continuous discussion about ourselves as individuals and the totality of the human experience.

There has been recent study of “The Republican Brain,” most specifically with journalist Chris Mooney’s book by the same name. Repeated studies have shown that Republicans tend to lack empathy. Why that is so is open to discussion. But the result is that most Republicans embrace policies that often deny the needs of at-risk individuals or groups within our society. At times, Republicans are outright mean or hostile.

Is this behavior a form of mental illness? It seems to reflect a lack of awareness of many who co-inhabit the planet with them. But psychologists are always struggling to define the boundaries between mental illness and just plain aberrant behavior.

One possibility is that the problems that progressives seem to have with Republicans reflect learning disabilities” rather than mental illness. Is it possible that Republicans simply have more difficulty picking up logical information than progressives do? Could that in part explain their irrational views on climate change? Could it also explain the closer connections that Republicans have to fundamentalist religions than Democrats?

These are obviously difficult questions to answer, in fact, to even ask. But they are becoming part of our dialogue. Kudos to Bernie Sanders for giving the issue a nudge before a national audience. There seems to be little doubt that when the reviews of Campaign 2016 are in, questions about mental health and learning disabilities will be raised about Republicans. But do we have to wait that long? It would be very dicey for CNN or MSNBC, or even The New York Times, to acknowledge and to try to identify this elephant in the room. But this may be the necessary next step for Americans to address to better understand the current political crisis that faces us.

The post The mental health of today’s Republican party appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Thirty-two million people stand to gain new or expanded access to mental health services as a result of a recent federal ruling that requires most health insurance plans to cover treatment of mental health illnesses, behavioral disorders, drug addiction and alcohol abuse. The rule will take effect in 2014, under the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act [Obamacare].

According to the White House, the rule is a major expansion of coverage. According to the New York Times, “In the past, nearly 20 percent of people buying insurance on their own did not have coverage for mental health services, and nearly one-third had no coverage for treatment of substance abuse.”

The new ruling is part of the revised definition of “essential services” that must be offered by health insurance plans starting in 2014. Kathleen Sebelius, the Obama administration’s secretary of health and human services, said standardizing benefits would make it easier for consumers to compare health plans. ”

According to the New York Times, the details of the ruling include the following provisions:

…Policies can be offered at four levels of coverage. Under the least generous policies, known as bronze plans, consumers will pay 40 percent of the costs of covered benefits, on average, and insurers will pay the rest. Under the most generous policies, known as platinum plans, consumers will pay 10 percent. The administration, however, declined to set a uniform national standard and allowed states to set many of the specific requirements.

Minimum benefits will vary from state to state, as each state will have a benchmark plan, reflecting coverage typically offered by employers. In more than 30 states, the benchmark, or standard, is an insurance plan offered by Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

Insurers in each state will generally be required to provide all benefits required by state laws adopted before Dec. 31, 2011. States can require additional benefits, but will have to pay the extra costs themselves.

More broadly, the new ruling brings America one step closer to mental-health parity, whereby insurers would be prohibited for charging higher premiums for policies that include mental health coverage. Mental health providers and advocacy groups have sought mental-health parity for years. Could we be inching toward that enlightened direction at long last?

In any event, it could be hard for anti-Obamacare zealots to argue against this new ruling. Opponents of Obamacare who are also staunch gun-rights advocates have taken to claiming that they want to keep guns out of the hands of people with mental illness. Expanding access to mental health care would seem, then, to be right up their alleys. Let’s see what happens next.

The post Good news from Obamacare: Insurers must offer mental health coverage appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Ask a politician where he or she stands on gun control legislation and it’s likely you will get an answer that involves “mental health.” Many say they support the common notion of second amendment rights, make a slight nod towards some flavor of legislation and then promptly seek safe haven in the call for better treatment of mental illness.

In Missouri, the responses are fairly similar no matter where you look on the political spectrum. From Roy Blunt:

The right of law-abiding citizens to own firearms is an individual right guaranteed by the Second Amendment of the Constitution and broadly interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. Our Founders clearly understood that one of the most basic rights of Americans is the ability to defend themselves and their families… I do believe it is important that we have a serious national discussion about preventing these senseless acts of violence and protecting our children in their schools…

Equally important, however, is an effort that more broadly addresses ways to spend federal dollars more wisely when it comes to treating and identifying those who are mentally ill as well as intervening before they tragically impact their own lives and the lives of others.

to Claire McCaskill:

As you know, the Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees Americans the fundamental right to bear arms.  I strongly support legal and safe gun ownership by law-abiding citizens and have consistently voted to uphold this constitutional right… At the same time, we have to make sure that guns do not fall into the hands of individuals who should not have them… We should have sensible, constitutional controls on gun ownership that address safety in our communities… Recent tragedies, such as the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and the horrific events in Newtown, Connecticut, have made it clear that our nation’s current gun laws should be reconsidered… Knowing that those responsible for some of the most prominent mass shootings in recent history have suffered from mental illness, it is equally clear that we must also consider mental health services available to our citizens.

It’s a safe dance. Who can argue with better mental health treatment? Dr. Richard Friedman brought a little perspective in a December 17 article in the New York Times:

All the focus on the small number of people with mental illness who are violent serves to make us feel safer by displacing and limiting the threat of violence to a small, well-defined group. But the sad and frightening truth is that the vast majority of homicides are carried out by outwardly normal people in the grip of all too ordinary human aggression to whom we provide nearly unfettered access to deadly force.

Then the New York Times took things an important step further in a February 24 editorial. The paper points out that a risk greater than mental illness lies in the mixing of alcohol and firearms.

Focusing on the mentally ill, most of whom are not violent, overlooks people who are at demonstrably increased risk of committing violent crimes but are not barred by federal law from buying and having guns. These would include people who have been convicted of violent misdemeanors including assaults, and those who are alcohol abusers. Unless guns are also kept from these high-risk people, preventable gun violence will continue…

The evidence linking alcohol abuse and gun-related violence is compelling. One study found that subjects who had ever been in trouble at work for drinking or were ever hospitalized for alcohol abuse were at increased risk of committing homicide and suicide. Other studies also suggest that alcohol abuse is a factor in the association between gun ownership and the criminal justice system.

Politicians may claim they are dealing with gun violence by focusing on mental illness, but they do so at our peril. There’s a lot at stake and so much more that can be done.

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Illinois Governor Pat Quinn has been suggesting the closure of Tamms supermax prison facility due to budget concerns. The response from downstate Illinois has focused on the cost in lost jobs to local communities and the region. Neither side in the debate over the future of Tamms seems overly concerned with the welfare of mentally ill inmates, nor the residents of Illinois who will encounter recently released inmates who have been refused treatment for years.

Closing Tamms would save Illinois $26 million annually, a key consideration at a time when the state is attempting to decide whether to fund prisons or vital services for children. The original purpose of Tamms was to house “the worst of the worst,” but all too often now houses “the sickest of the sick”. Prisoners are placed in individual cells, only coming out for an hour a day to spend in an outdoor concrete box. By design, there are no common areas for inmates, and most interactions with staff take place through the cell door. This costs the taxpayers $64,000 a year per prisoner, who are selected for this treatment entirely at the whim of the Department of Corrections, with little to no oversight.

Lawsuits recently initiated on behalf of inmates at Tamms, and other supermax facilities reveal costs that are truly horrific. An article in The Atlantic describes the ordeal of Jack Powers. Powers made the error assisting a fellow inmate who had been attacked by members of the Aryan Brotherhood, a notorious prison gang. I say mistake, because the Department of Corrections (DOC) failed to provide adequate protection after the incident, allowing the gang to regularly harrass and threaten him. Mr. Powers had no prior history of mental illness, but he reports that the constant threats led him to begin cutting himself in order to seek an outlet for his stress. Mr. Powers has since been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and has cut off his own pinkie, carved skin off of his face, amputated his scrotum and one of his testicles, as well as attempting suicide more than once. Mr. Powers was sent to supermax due to self-harm and threats from the gang, where he is refused medications for his PTSD. DOC policies do not allow psychotropic medications in supermax, so his condition regularly worsens. He self-mutilates, is sent to a hospital unit where he is stabilized and put back on medication, and is transferred back to supermax where no medications are allowed, and the cycle continues.

The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is alleged to have a long history of ignoring mental illness diagnoses for inmates, and even recommendations of judges that the sentenced individual receive treatment. The current lawsuit on behalf of inmates details haphazard methods of administering medications and frequent slip-ups, scheduling doses incorrectly and even mixing up different people’s prescriptions. The BOP has also been accused of refusing access to life-saving medications when an individual has his own supply, and is in jail due to an old history of writing bad checks.

The current debate over whether to refit Tamms, or to close it entirely, centers around whether it is even possible to turn it into a general facility. Tamms was designed without any common areas, so there is no cafeteria, no gym, no classrooms, etc. In order to provide religious services (only recently instituted), inmates are placed in individualcells, with the chaplain giving sermons through the bars.

Proponents claim that supermax prisons have reduced violence and cut off some of the worst abuses by gang leaders who are removed from the general population. Opponents note that many of those sent to supermax facilities were originally convicted of relatively minor offenses and were transferred due to worsening mental health symptoms when refused proper treatment. A recent court ruling states that the public does not even have the right to know why a prisoner was transferred to Tamms in the first place. Inmates participating in lawsuits are reporting that prison officials are threatening them with “payback” if they do not drop their lawsuit. It certainly seems that a lot of effort is being spent to make sure that what happens at Tamms stays at Tamms.

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