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Did Mental Illness Drive Gabrielle Giffords’ Shooter?
Did mental illness contribute to the tragedy in Arizona?
An image is beginning to emerge of the man who shot Gabrielle Giffords. Jared Lee Loughner lived with his parents. He recently withdrew from college at Pima County Community College after five run-ins with campus police over his disruptive behavior. He posted ominous videos to the Internet, and he was behaving increasingly erratically.
More than a few people have called him crazy.
They don’t just mean crazy in the casual sense. They mean that Loughner is truly, severely mentally ill.
On the one hand, it’s hard to argue that any sane person would indiscriminately shoot over a dozen people in a public gathering. On the other hand, one doesn’t wish to chalk up to mental illness what might really be attributed to malice. Loughner’s strange behavior before the attack certainly suggests he was becoming unhinged. Maybe he’s schizophrenic, as the nice ladies at Slate have said.
Of course the legal system will have to sort out just how sane Loughner really is. From our armchair psychologist perspective, perhaps the best we can do is use this as a teachable moment for reflecting on our assumptions about mental illness.
Over at Ain’t Yo Mama’s Blog, Aimee focuses her Mental Monday feature on how to recognize the signs and symptoms of incipient mental illness. It’s important that we all know this, she says, so that we can work to get help for those we care about before they become a danger to themselves or those around them. Aimee also explains what your options are to intervene and get help for someone, even when they don’t want it. No one wants to think about having their loved ones committed, but if someone is severely sick, making that emergency call could save a life.
At Double X, they take on the issue of stigma against mental health patients. Yes, mental health issues carry huge stigma. It should be easier and more socially acceptable to talk openly about all sorts of mental health problems. But doing away with stigma doesn’t mean doing away with caution.
A large Swedish study claims that the mentally ill are no more likely to commit violent crimes than the rest of us. The actual data suggest otherwise, though. Emily Yoffe makes a pretty convincing case that being severely out of touch with consensual reality leads to violent crime, at rates shockingly higher than those in the general population.
That doesn’t mean you should assume your coworker is toting a pistol in her purse along with her anti-depressants. It does mean that Aimee is probably on the right track suggesting we should all be able to recognize the warning signs of a mental health crisis.
Photo: iStock
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Did Mental Illness Drive Gabrielle Giffords Shooter? | Family Health Corner commented on Jan 11 11 at 4:19 amBetsy commented on Jan 11 11 at 4:44 amI think about this a lot. It seems clear to me, from my armchair, that this man has been showing all the signs of serious mental illness for a while. When I was in college, living in off-campus housing, an obviously schizophrenic woman was placed in our house as a roommate. Her odd antics scared the pants off of us and we all locked our doors at night. No one we complained to would listen to us. Once it got so bad, there were some verbal threats, one of my roommates called the governor’s office and was informed that until she did herself or someone else physical harm we had no rights whatsoever to have her removed from our house. That was a wake up call. Long story short, it’s complicated. And it’s too bad this man could not be helped before he did so much damage.
JenB commented on Jan 11 11 at 8:48 pmOf course the suggestions on the linked blog post are perfectly reasonable. However, there are not enough resources for helping those who are mentally ill. If you have an adult child who is mentally ill, your options can be very limited depending on where you live and if you have insurance. This young man was an adult. From speaking with a friend who was involuntarily committed, that is good for a limited time (in her case 72 hours). The standard for committing someone involuntarily is very high. In my city, they just had an article in the paper about the closing of the local psychiatric hospital and how the other hospitals can’t pick up the slack. The police now have nowhere to go with the mentally ill who have repeated brushes with the law. The article was prompted by a mentally ill man who was shot by police over the holidays. He had been picked up and let go three times over as many days by different police in the greater metro area. He was obviously ill, so they didn’t want to lock him up, but there were no psychiatric services that would take him. He was released into his mother’s custody (she is a licensed social worker), but being an adult he took off, he was also off his meds. The last time he was picked up an officer thought he was reaching into his coat for a weapon and shot him. The man was unarmed. The point is that there is not an adequate safety net to help the mentally ill and their families. From the armchair? I doubt there was anything the family of the Arizona shooter could do.
Don commented on Jan 11 11 at 8:59 pmStigma! Yeah! If you were committed for a year and then tried to find a job upon re-entrance to society, what exactly would you tell your prospective employer you had been doing for the past year? It would completely wreck your life. Who in their right mind (pun intended) would ever do such a thing?
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