Tag: mass shootings

“Easier access” to mental health treatment is likely to translate to getting more kids in front of more prescribers to produce more lifetime customers.

Teenage boys and young men tell me they have no hope that school shootings will decrease because all they hear in the news are authorities’ ideas about how better to control them. They are angered by compulsory mental health screenings and are certain that the effect on kids with greater potential for violence could be disastrous.

From WBUR: National tragedies such as the recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida can be traumatic even for those who were not directly affected. It is...

According to a new statement released by the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA), the causes of firearm violence are complex and multifactorial, and gun violence...

From the New York Post: Mass murderer Stephen Paddock was reportedly prescribed anti-anxiety medication this past summer. The gunman purchased 50 10-milligram tablets of Valium...

At CounterPunch, Joseph Natoli connects Big Pharma, mass shootings, and rampant inequality. He writes: “The Brave New World soma strategy to deal with a population that, were they not doped up, might violently disrupt that brave new world, is useful if a society is ‘creatively destroying’ a growing number of its population each day. While the poor have daily evidence of their poverty, a collapsing middle class live in the illusion that they are middle class and just a short distance, not from ruin, but from fame and fortune. They are, in short, heading for a catastrophic break-down. Big Pharma is already set to give us all a ‘soft landing.’”

Over at CounterPunch, Carl Boggs takes on the knee-jerk mental illness response that pervades the airwaves after every mass shooting. He writes: “What the mental-health fixation lacks is any semblance of historical or social context. Given the persistence of U.S. imperialism and militarism — and mounting fascination with combat and guns in a society transfigured by its warfare state — Washington remains a thriving center of global violence: repeated armed interventions abroad have found their domestic parallel in the world’s largest prison system, a deepening gun culture, home-bred terrorism, police atrocities, and a media culture filled with spectacles of warfare and bloodshed.”

On her blog, A Disordered World, psychiatric survivor Jeanene Harlick writes that “prejudicial rhetoric about the mentally ill, following mass shootings, is exacerbating the already-overwhelming stigma, discrimination and oppression we experience as an unrecognized and disadvantaged minority group.”