Published by El Nuevo Herald on December 28, 2012
In light of the recent slaughter of children in Connecticut, we ask what is the role of the national government in the prevention and treatment of mental illness.
In the U.S. there are excellent private psychiatric hospitals like McLean Hospital in Massachusetts and the Menninger Clinic in Texas. But what are the government asylums?
Perhaps the last known was St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington DC, on whose lands run from May 2013 the central command of the National Guard.
The St Elizabeths Hospital, founded in 1855, came to own 100 buildings and treat more than 125,000 patients, including Richard Lawrence, who tried to kill President Andrew Jackson, and John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan.
Now we wonder: where are served the mentally unbalanced without financial resources? The answer seems inconceivable: in jail. For example, in Florida, 1,200 jail beds of Miami-Dade County are occupied by prisoners with serious mental problems and so this organism can be considered the largest mental health center in the state.
The problem is that usually the Public Psychiatry confuses the terms when attending cases such as substance abuse, homeless, AIDS patients and extremely poor minority. Perhaps for this reason, private psychiatric hospitals received only 38% of public funds in 1988, compared with 62% of private funds, including insurance.
Of course, in definition of psychiatric diagnosis the doubts persist, as was established with Rosenhan experiment performed in 1972. The psychologist David Rosenhan began sending healthy patients to 12 mental hospitals, individuals masquerading as psychotic. All were admitted and diagnosed with mental illness. Even when fake patients argued feel good, hospitals refused to release them.
As we see, a true psychiatric diagnosis is not easy. The really important thing would be to find "a priori" patients with potential to threaten the lives of others or their own.
If we do not want to see other massacres, like Arizona, where he was wounded Congresswoman Gabby Gifford, the Columbine, the Virginia Tech or this horrendous massacre of children in Connecticut, we have to implement emergency measures. . And among them, surely, must be the creation of a federal mechanism led by the FBI, which issue permits to carry weapons after approval of a psychiatric examination specially designed to detect potential murderers. This is just one of many economic measures we can take to protect the innocent from many deranged swarming our streets.
Lets Go !!!!
BENJAMIN F. DeYURRE
Economist and Journalist
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