Well it's mornin' time. Wakey wakey! I would have checked in, but for once in a blue moon I slept all the way through the night.
I'll start the day off with a bitch, and y'all can pick it up later if you like.
I have a really close friend who is a licensed family and marriage therapist. Consequently she knows an awful lot about courts and mental health care and resources here in Virginia. We talk, and I pay some attention to the news.
Over the past 5 plus years, state- and county-funded mental health resources are moving more toward community based treatments and very, very far away from inpatient mental health treatment that some seriously mentally ill people need. So in other words, say you have a child who has schizoaffective disorder and regularly goes off the rails because he won't take his meds when he isn't in the hospital. Who takes care of him? No one, or a member of his family who is unqualified and who probably cannot do a thing about making him take his meds and helping him get himself stabilized again.
Our Governor, some years ago, did convince himself to dedicate some funds for mental health outpatient Medicaid (for both general medical and mental health care, but NO inpatient benefits) after the son of a US Senator from Virginia went flop bot and shot his dad and nearly killed him, then drove out into the country and shot and killed himself. The day before that happened, he'd had a mental health intake evaluation and needed a bed somewhere in an inpatient facility, and they could not find a place to put him. When a Senator got shot, the Governor did something. Not the right thing, but something.
I don't know what the cause is, but our country is absolutely full of mentally ill people. And of course, now we have HIPAA, so docs and therapists can't talk to anyone about a patient/client of theirs without that patient's permission. So unless they know that a crime is about to be committed, IS IMMINENT, they have to keep the knowledge of the shape this person is in to themselves.
We can't do anything about anyone until they've done something bad enough to generate felony or CAPITAL charges and convictions. We can't have a place to check to see if a person has serious mental instability before we sell them a gun, be it a 22 that goes in some woman's purse, or an AR-15 that could be used to shoot up a school in mere minutes. Everyone is so damn concerned about their right to PRIVACY, that they forget that with rights come responsibilities. If you want privacy, you can't do crazy shit, you can't be dangerous to other people. You don't have the right to have your doctor or therapist not say something when you are in a state that puts the rest of us in danger.
I hope I haven't made enemies here with what I've said. People who have mental illness tend to get very bent out of shape when they encounter opinions like mine. But I have guns, matter of fact I live in a house FULL of guns, and as long as I'm rational, I don't intend to pick them up and go shoot all my neighbors or something. If I did get into a mental state like that, I'd hope someone around me could pick up the damn phone and call the cops and say, my wife/friend/mother is off her rocker and I'm afraid she's about to go shoot the neighbors after she shoots all of us. AND THEN, the cops need to have the authority and the resources to be able to respond.
Obviously people do stuff like that. We have to stop ignoring it and hoping it will just magically go away. We might just have to "violate someone's right to privacy" to keep the rest of us, the vast majority of us, safe.
ETA: God, I'm on a roll now. A couple more things. It isn't just kids who need to be protected. It's everyone. And next. A person who takes anti-psychotic meds (either for psychosis or just treatment-resistant depression or even as medication to help them sleep) can become psychotic if they suddenly stop their meds, EVEN IF they've never had a psychotic episode before. This happened to my son and he ended up in prison because of it. We need mental health care and education, desperately. As it is right now, if you've never had this in your immediate family or amongst your friends, or you haven't been educated in a mental health field, chances are YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND mental illness. These folks who are this seriously ill take actions that they cannot control. It is possible for a human being to have a seriously altered perception of reality. It is possible that they hallucinate or become dangerously paranoid. And of course, this also happens with drug abuse, too, with substances like m*thamphetamines, c*caine (especially cr*ck c*caine), and some of the newer "designer" drugs and other mess that people put into their bodies.
I'm hoping I can hush now, but perhaps not. Don't know yet. This is my main bitch, though. It's a thing that has affected my life in a very dramatic and destructive way, and furthermore, it continued for a period of over 15 years. It has affected my children and grandchildren. It ain't something to mess around with. And it raises its ugly head again every time something like the Florida school shooting shows up in the news. We do a sorry-ass job in this country of taking care of mentally ill people, and frankly we do a sorry-ass job of taking care of anyone who has any kind of medical problem, if the person with the problem isn't rolling in money. But that's another conversation altogether.