11 thoughts on “The Mental-Health “Experts””

  1. I have a Ph.D. in my profession. The principal thing it taught me is to be incredibly skeptical of the so-called (frequently self-anointed) experts.

  2. The problem with using mental health as an excuse to take away the right to bear arms is that it isn’t intended to just remove firearms from people who are actually insane but to remove firearms from anyone for subjective interpretations of the emotions that all humans possess. Have you ever been angry? Literally every human being has been angry at some point in their life. Same with being sad, jealous, blissful, ect.

    In Washington, we just passed an anti-second amendment law that requires law enforcement to do a yearly assessment of everyone who has purchased a firearm to determine if they are still legal to own a gun. One of the requirements is now mental health and people who buy guns have to undergo a mental health background check. I have no idea how this will be enforced as the bill left it up to law enforcement to make it all up as they go. It does leave the door open to some excessive hoops to jump through every year.

    While the article linked shows how mental health practitioners were not so great at identifying actual crazy people, like the guy from that bar who was seeing one, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t erroneously label safe people as unsafe. When having to check millions of people a year, errors will be made that are detrimental to innocent people. Errors will be encouraged to be made because mental health reviewers will be held responsible for mistakes, meaning they will err on the side of hurting innocent people rather than suffering professional harm.

  3. While there certainly are people who are too crazy to own guns, the left have a long and valiant history of using ‘mental health’ as a tool to attack their opponents. How long will it be before simply having right-wing views proves you’re mentally ill, as it did in the Soviet Union?

        1. Which goes with what I’ve heard of mental health professionals having a higher rate of mental illness than the population at large.

    2. Here in Michigan there was just this week a news story about some poor unfortunate who offended someone or other.

      It appears to have started with an anonymous accusation, perhaps from a spiteful neighbor or ex-girlfriend, that an individual made people “feel uncomfortable” because, horrors! he owned firearms. And so, law enforcement, which apparently has nothing better to do in the Ann Arbor area than to go on fishing expeditions, approached the individual’s ISP to look for his Google search records, and found, horrors! he had been searching for information about local law enforcement response times–which is, of course, a “red flag” that can only be interpreted as meaning he was planning a mass murder of some kind. After all, the individual was also a law-abiding citizen with no criminal or mental health record, and a firearms hobbyist. This “obsession with weapons,” we were told, is another “red flag” that justifies, well, just about anything, donchaknow, oh jeez oh pete.

      So Ann Arbor’s finest dug and dug and dug and dug and finally found that, a decade ago or more, the “terror suspect” had made a somewhat optimistic estimate of his income on an application for a credit card. And that was enough to justify a visit from the SWAT team for “felony wire fraud,” to confiscate his property and haul him off to the nuthouse in chains.

      I suppose he should count his blessings. A similar raid in Maryland last month resulted in the “suspect’s” death at police hands, but that’s okay, we are assured, because all of the SWAT team made it home safely, and anyway, the guy was some kind of Nazi or something–he must have been, or he wouldn’t have owned guns–and those people have it coming. Right? Right. He probably voted Republican or something.

      And so spokesmen for the county government and the mayor’s office were all over local talk radio this week, burbling about how they’d “saved lives” by “cutting through the red tape” in order to perform this “brave intervention” for reasons of “mental health.” Because, you see, “people have a right to feel safe.” None of the hosts, of course, asked any questions about whether the guy who got handcuffed and shackled in front of his neighbors, then shot full of Thorazine and stuffed into a straitjacket in a padded cell, had any rights, or about whether he felt safe when the Man kicked in his door, machine guns at the ready.

      And, you know, I’ve been looking through the Constitution, and I can’t find in it anywhere any suggestion that the government is responsible for anyone’s emotional state, or has any obligation to make people feel anything whatsoever, but I guess OLDTHINKERS UNBELLYFEEL INGSOC.

  4. In the 70′ I worked in a mental institution on the east coast. One day a group of lawyers show up and began interviewing patients. All were non violent patients that stayed there voluntarily, and a large number of them were just dropped ate the front door by desperate families. They were told that the state could not keep them there and they were free to go. Many did, many cried and pleaded to be allowed to stay. Those that left wandered downtown with no means and not even proper clothing. After a few days most were gone. I shutter to think of what their fates were. Not being a danger to themselves or other was probably their death sentence.

    1. It had to do with funding but was covered by a veneer of concern for “human rights”.
      Another one of the solved problems our society has unsolved. Note that not all problems have “nice” solutions but usually ones we can live with are found.

  5. Bruce Bawer’s piece is schizo. On the one hand he condemns the profession of psychology and psychiatry as full of arrogant incompetents, yet he also wants to grant them greater power to involuntarily commit patients?

    WTF?

Comments are closed.