Mental health funding has taken a beating at all levels, and regardless of what you think of Obamacare, ending it will impact many people's ability to get mental health treatment.
I'm surprised gun owners haven't been louder about supporting wider access to mental health treatment. It seems like something that could benefit society, make these sorts of events less frequent and blunt the 'what are you doing to change things' argument made by the left after a shooting.
The issue, I have with this! Just about every mental health issues, is treated with drugs. You feel angry take this. You feel down take this one. You want to quit smoking, take this one. There was report few years ago, taking about all shooting had a prescription drugs in common.
The extent to which the mental health system needs/should be addressed is, sadly, vast. But if we keep saying that these are incidents of mental health issues, shouldn't we also work to improve access (and yes, the system) so that they will slow or stop?
And i agree, pills probably aren't the answer, but neither is a system that fails to identify and help people with serious mental health issues.
Pills can be part of the answer.
Some of us, both gun owners AND medical professionals, have been screaming it for years - we need a better mental health system!
Yes, too many people (medical providers, that is) just want to throw a script at someone - "Here, take this Zoloft, or Celexa, or Wellbutrin, or XXXX blah blah blah." Even worse is the f***ing XANAX. OMG if I see one more 21 y/o who is on CHRONIC F***ING XANAX.... ARGH!
Yes, meds CAN and DO have a place for some people. But, as I have tried to tell people for years (both patients AND other providers), mental health issues MUST be approached on a multi-disciplinary level. They MUST.
If you want it treated properly and effectively, you need therapy. Not just counseling, true, THERAPY. Like cognitive-behavioral therapy or deep psychoanalysis that helps you get to the ROOT of why you have depression/anxiety/agoraphobia/panic disorder/etc., as well as learning how to COPE with it, how to ADJUST your mindset and behaviors and you have to CONTINUE this therapy for years, maybe even for life! Too many people (yes, providers, too) think they can just take a pill once a day, go see a counselor once a month or so and talk about their feelings for an hour (which is usually more like 35-45 minutes of actual discourse) and they should be good.
We have a terrible lack of true mental health care in this country, and we have a terrible lack of commitment to making it more effective, both from the provider AND from the patient standpoint. The commitment to true therapy is just. not. there. Not at all.
Yes, pills can help, but they aren't going to "fix your problem". Just like blood pressure pills, diabetes pills, cholesterol pills, etc. They may help mitigate the end result, but the problem is the process that got you to that point. Overeating, laziness, genetics, smoking, overworking, etc. Lifestyle changes make at least as much difference in these problems as medications, and oftentimes much, much more difference.
But going to your doc and saying, "Give me a pill," is easier vs. putting in long hours of hard work, effort, dedication, education, lifestyle modification and sweat are just NOT the (New) American Way, unfortunately.
Some of us, both gun owners AND medical professionals, have been screaming it for years - we need a better mental health system!
Yes, too many people (medical providers, that is) just want to throw a script at someone - "Here, take this Zoloft, or Celexa, or Wellbutrin, or XXXX blah blah blah." Even worse is the f***ing XANAX. OMG if I see one more 21 y/o who is on CHRONIC F***ING XANAX.... ARGH!
Yes, meds CAN and DO have a place for some people. But, as I have tried to tell people for years (both patients AND other providers), mental health issues MUST be approached on a multi-disciplinary level. They MUST.
If you want it treated properly and effectively, you need therapy. Not just counseling, true, THERAPY. Like cognitive-behavioral therapy or deep psychoanalysis that helps you get to the ROOT of why you have depression/anxiety/agoraphobia/panic disorder/etc., as well as learning how to COPE with it, how to ADJUST your mindset and behaviors and you have to CONTINUE this therapy for years, maybe even for life! Too many people (yes, providers, too) think they can just take a pill once a day, go see a counselor once a month or so and talk about their feelings for an hour (which is usually more like 35-45 minutes of actual discourse) and they should be good.
We have a terrible lack of true mental health care in this country, and we have a terrible lack of commitment to making it more effective, both from the provider AND from the patient standpoint. The commitment to true therapy is just. not. there. Not at all.
Yes, pills can help, but they aren't going to "fix your problem". Just like blood pressure pills, diabetes pills, cholesterol pills, etc. They may help mitigate the end result, but the problem is the process that got you to that point. Overeating, laziness, genetics, smoking, overworking, etc. Lifestyle changes make at least as much difference in these problems as medications, and oftentimes much, much more difference.
But going to your doc and saying, "Give me a pill," is easier vs. putting in long hours of hard work, effort, dedication, education, lifestyle modification and sweat are just NOT the (New) American Way, unfortunately.
That's the thing. If they performed brain scans and other clinical tests to confirm actual physical issues prior to prescribing some of these powerful drugs, I could see it. In most cases they don't, so they're literally doing trial and error medicine.
fMRI is good, but it does not always show everything you may need to know, every case is different. What shows up on one scan may not on another even for the same person. That is why a multi discipline approach is needed.
Eh, that's not going to give us much information, really. You're talking about Functional MRI at a very minimum, and that is mainly used in research. It's for correlation of symptoms with function of the brain, but it isn't really necessary or helpful on an individual case basis. Plus, in order to make that achievable, we'd need thousands of them all over the country and they'd still be booked out to the moon and you'd have to train thousands of people to read them appropriately and make the clinical correlations. Cost vs. benefit in this arena wouldn't be helpful, as I just don't see alot of need for it. Lots of other places to put those kind of billions in mental health.
<edited to add> I should note, this is just my opinion as a primary care provider, I am NOT a neuroscience researcher and have limited knowledge of these kinds of things.
<edited to add> I should note, this is just my opinion as a primary care provider, I am NOT a neuroscience researcher and have limited knowledge of these kinds of things.
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