America: Where It's Easier to Get a Gun Than Good Mental Health Care

[Brewman_Jax]

http://www.alternet.org/story/155724/ame...alth_care/

From the article:

Quote:Last spring my younger sister Kathy jumped off a freeway bridge in Phoenix. For better or worse, she lived. Kathy made her first suicide gesture in high school, when she took a handful of, I think, aspirin in reaction to a bad haircut. At the time, she was already, obviously, mentally ill. In middle school, anorexia had drawn her down to a skeletal 38 pounds. Her hair fell out. Her sunken face took on a plastic texture from fat-soluble vitamins that her body couldn’t process. Force-feeding brought her back from the brink, but couldn’t heal her. In the years since, even during three pregnancies, she has never topped 100 pounds, nor has she ever been free of compulsions, body-loathing or debilitating bouts of depression.

Since that first handful of analgesics, Kathy has made an effort to die somewhere between 12 and 15 times: prescription pills, threatened jumps from an apartment balcony and a communications tower, an attempt at drowning, a car set on fire. Kathy is alive because even in the heart of Arizona’s Wild West no one will sell her a gun; a fact she finds immensely frustrating at times that her bipolar illness takes her into another trough of despair.

For three days, Seattle has been reeling, grieving a wave of senseless violence that left five dead, including a shooter who was, from his family’s description, bipolar like my sister. Mentally ill women are most likely to exit this world alone or try to take their children with them. Some men prefer to go out in a blaze of rage and blood. Either way, access to a gun makes the impulse more lethal. Firearms are two and a half times more effective than the next method of suicide, suffocation. According to Centers for Disease Control statistics for 2003-2007, gunshots represented only 3 percent of suicide attempts, but almost half of fatalities. So far this year, over 40,000 people in the U.S. have been shot. By December 31, we can expect to bury about 9,500, each dead at the hands of someone pulling a trigger. Guns were designed to be effective, efficient killing machines, and they work very well.

...

The country's priorities are really wrong when it gladly spends so much on bullets and bombs and so little on beds, books, bread, and treatment. We gladly spend so much to throw people into and keep them in prison, and complain about spending relatively little money to keep them out; the return on investment is excellent.

Why is it like this? Follow the money.

[sandnsea]

Where it's easier to get a gun than a ballot. And yes this country's priorities are horrific.

[Brewman_Jax]

(06-12-2012 11:20 AM)sandnsea Wrote:  Where it's easier to get a gun than a ballot. And yes this country's priorities are horrific.

So true. Spending money on treatment on treatment is cheaper than prison, but there's no social will to spend the money that way. Spending more on prison makes society feel better--and certain individuals very rich.