The Mental Health System Can’t Stop Mass Shooters

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In this piece for The New York Times, psychiatrist Amy Barnhorst explains why it is not feasible for mental health professionals to identify or treat people at risk of committing mass shootings.

“The reason the mental health system fails to prevent mass shootings is that mental illness is rarely the cause of such violence. Even if all potential mass shooters did get psychiatric care, there is no reliable cure for angry young men who harbor violent fantasies. And the laws intended to stop the mentally ill from buying guns are too narrow and easily sidestepped; people like Nikolas Cruz and my patient are unlikely to qualify.

Instead of hoping that imposing mental health treatment on everyone who shows ‘red flags’ will put an end to mass shootings, we should focus on ways to put some distance between these young men and their guns.”

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3 COMMENTS

  2. Psychiatry is a sexist pseudoscience, a drug racket, and a means of social control. It’s 21st Century Phrenology, with potent neuro-toxins. When you translate Amy Barnhorst’s psychobabble and gobbledygook into plain English, her ignorance of men and boys, and her failure-to-treat, becomes apparent. This is not surprising. Psychs are NOT at all concerned with helping children become healthy, happy, independent, fully functioning adults in a healthy society. As the social parasites and Trojan Horses which they truly are, psychs such as Amy Barnhorst are really only interested in $elling drug$, and advancing their own narrow, selfish Guild interests. Of course they would object to this most honest characterization. They delude themselves, and strive to delude others, into thinking that they “care” about “society”, and “persons”. Rather, like the pre-programmed automatons they truly are, they only care about the facade, the image. The CON. About making money for PhRMA, and lording power over vulnerable persons. Psychiatry has done, and continues to do, far more harm than good. If psychiatry were truly able to help boys and men, then all the guns in the world wouldn’t result in mass-casualty school shooters.
    In other words, what Amy Barnhorst and her ilk are saying here is, : “We psychs have NO idea what makes young men violent, what to do about it, or even how to identify them. We’re basically useless social parasites.”
    But that’s what *I* started off this comment saying about psychs. Thank-you for proving my point in your own words, Amy Barnhorst. Why don’t you try to get your fellow quack shrinks to see the LIGHT, also….????….
    (c)2018, Tom Clancy, Jr., *NON-fiction

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