You ain’t wrong, but I maintain…
We are measuring mental health incorrectly, then. The statistic is 100%. Anyone who’d pick up a gun as an answer to life’s problems is bent. So we are not measuring it properly.
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Says who? I say mental health status determination is being applied incorrectly.
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Millions and millions of people killed animals and each other for hundreds of thousands of years, as the normal course of life. In order to survive, in revenge, and doubtlessly sometimes just for the hell of it.
Were every last one of them mentally broken?
I think there’s a chauvanism to modern thinking. Once during our country’s history, many people could justify to themselves, and sleep well at night their ownership of slaves. Were they, every last one of them mentally ill? Perhaps, but perhaps what we call mental illness, was normal and accepted in times past, and perhaps some of what we consider mentally illnesses today, will be seen as absolutely a normal part of the healthy population in the future…
I’ve been smoking some funny stuff though, so I’m thinking a lot less judgmentally. Perhaps I’m not making sense.
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We don’t live in those times, we live now. I see the point you are making, but I still am of the opinion that we are measuring mental health wrong. Here, take a trip through the broad categories of disorders:
And cast your mind back the the mass-killers’ profiles, as we have been presented them in the media. Not all mass killers are the same. But there are some pretty striking stand-out characteristics that you can see even in the broad categories, without even drilling down into the specific symptoms.
So, I think John Oliver’s 12% statistic is off. Way off. Mental health is not being evaluated well, which is an indication of how poor our mental health system is: we don’t give a rat’s ass about it and so it doesn’t do its job correctly.
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I can’t disagree with you there. As far as I see it, we’re expressing very similar ideas, but with different applied biases. And that’s cool. We’re not brain-clones or anything.
Hey and nobody had to tell the other one to have sex with himself and travel somewhere to do it. No wonder we shorten that phrase down to three words; that was an… eherm… mouthful. THis is getting worse.
Where in the world are you? I am in sunny Texas, but the sun is not out yet.
Seattle. Of course. The air is thick enough, and the recreational pot is legal enough that I can have thoughts I normally dismiss, instead of hemorrhaging from the upper frontal facehole, as Zoidberg might put it.
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The stats were quoted in the first three minutes of the video.
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Weird side note. I clicked on a clickbait yesterday. It was a slideshow about the worst mass killings in the USA over the last 50 or 60 years. Over and over, I saw this weird thing: the commonest number that the worst mass killers kill is 13 people. It happens again and again. Sure, there are other numbers all over the place. But the one that keeps coming up is 13 victims.
OK, well I guess its up to you to substantiate that. It’s consistent with my understanding, which admittedly is based on information I haven’t been able to source.
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Multiply the array of commonly available weapons’ standard and aftermarket magazine capacities, by the array of accuracies of people who have varying experience with firearms and realistic firearm simulations… Then you have a relatively interesting constant for the number of victims given everyone’s average accuracy and some constant for the target density. And probably other variables because things are never that simple. I wouldn’t start at 13… That’s working backwards from the scientific method. We should start from somewhere further out and work towards the models that might reasonably predict those thirteens. And then see what those models might predict…
Or is that plan just as bad? I can’t tell… It seems like we should test with extra scrutiny patterns that coincide with superstitions.
I dunno. All I know is what I saw… clusters of 13 come up a disproportionate number of times. If I had to plot it, I would say it’s a zero-bounded right tailed distribution with a noticeable spike (or cliff) at 13. Which is 14 if you include the killer who killed himself after he killed the 13 people. But I digress.
Alright, I’m glad everyone is so motivated, let’s do it! How about a single payer publicly funded system giving everyone access to mental health care. You get one psychiatrist visit per year for a general checkup, with any doctor being able to refer you to a psychiatrist at any time if you need additional free care. If the psychiatrist recommends medication, group therapy or individual pyschotherapy then we’ll pay for that too. We’ll create adequate beds in facilities for people in crisis and staff and maintain those facilities appropriately.
Since everyone is on board, this is the time to act!
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So, all revolutionaries, successful or not, are crazy? Explains a lot actually.
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No man, we are not talking about military actions here. Wrong thread. We are talking about murder and murderers. But I see the shades of irony, and that part I like.
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That seems like nonsense, unless you define healthy people to be a very narrow set of people. People make impulsive decisions based on their emotions. They also make systematic decisions based on lies they tell themselves. People act without good information. People fail to check their assumptions about reality. People are bad at getting any perspective other than their own. That is all standard for humanity, not abnormal.
It is only an accident of history that half the people you know aren’t currently supporting a facist government marching people off to death camps. The same accident of history is the only reason that nearly the entirety of the other half isn’t complicit in that, too scared to act.
America is a society that reaches for guns when it feels upset or threatened. That is not a mental illness, that is a societal value (at least for a large fraction of Americans). In pretty much any other place on Earth if someone points a gun at you you just do what they say, the top value being that everyone leave the situation alive. In America is a society that declares vast swaths of lives to be throwaways. A person who thinks that women stole his job, his place at a good school, or his position in society’s hierarchy is a self-centered misogynist - and to me, that is unhinged - but in America, the decision that a gun is the solution to that problem isn’t some radical way of thinking, it’s just a few standard deviations off the norm. It’s an expected outcome.
There is this imagined mass killer in the American mind. A mass killer who is very intelligent, very dedicated to killing. A person who will pick the right time and the right place to do the most damage. A person who will find a way to circumvent any law or security put in place. A person who can’t be stopped. A person that appears at random in the population but, inexplicably, seems to appear in America more than anywhere else.
Australia had 10 gun massacres leading up to their banning of guns in 1996 and hasn’t had one since. Where are those resourceful killers? Where did they go when gun control came in? Why haven’t they been bombing things, or releasing poison gas on public transit, or getting hired at nursing homes and messing with the meds of old people who were likely to die soon anyway so that they can go on killing for years?
It’s pure fantasy. Angry people, calm people, delusional people, objective people, fat people, thin people, all people are subject to culture. When the cultural message is, “Get a gun to protect yourself,” that message gets through to practiced gun experts who have a hope of using a gun to protect themselves, to scared amateurs who are far more likely to be killed by their own gun than to use it themselves, and to angry anti-social people who think they need to protect themselves from women, or black people, or journalists or classmates.
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THAT is the very definition of a mental illness. Remember, mental illness can be as simple as addiction to cigarettes, or as profound as paranoid schizophrenia. It is a very wide range. So, reaching for a gun to solve a problem with being upset falls well within that spectrum of illness. Being upset is normal and natural; we have to sometimes, to be human. But it is our choices and rationales and what we do with the emotions that define whether we have chosen a healthy path or a path of illness. Choosing the gun is as definable as mental illness as is choosing alcohol to “solve” life’s woes.
It is definable as a mental illness, if we choose to, since we decide what is and what isn’t. It doesn’t fit definitions that exist right now. Maybe we ought to give those definitions a second thought. It is pretty amazing that wanting to hurt and kill romantic partners is just normal (criminal, but normal) human behaviour but washing your hands too much is crazy.
We have medications for both, but the OCD hand-washers are a little less scary when they’re visiting the office.
