Ann Coulter wrote a column about crazy people the other day, proving just how crazy she really is. It seems that Coulter is upset about the latest shooting in the navy yard in Washington.
Yes, of course, it’s Obama’s fault. It seems that he didn’t put Aaron Alexis, the shooter away in an institution so as to protect the American people from this obvious crazy man.
Coulter isn’t completely crazy. There is a definite lack in our health care system as it relates to people with mental illness. This is true whether or not the mentally ill person in question has managed to knock off multiples of his fellow citizens or not. The history of the treatment of mental illness in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries in this country is an abomination. It wasn’t until 1972 when revelations about the mistreatment of patients at the Willow Brook hospital, a Staten Island, holding pen for mentally ill children, came to light, in a series of sensational reports by Heraldo Rivera.
Rivera’s revelations brought about a rush to judgment about our entire mental health situation, which, much like other rushes to judgment, turned out to be a disaster. Entire hospitals, indeed, entire systems of hospitals were closed and the patients just evicted, abandoned, to fend for themselves.
In 1985, I was involved in shooting a film called Trapped in Silence, staring Keefer Southerland and Marsha Mason, at the all but abandoned Wingdale hospital in upstate New York. At that time the only section of the hospital still operating was that reserved for young people whose birth conditions were so severe that they were completely unable to even begin to care for themselves. The evidence of the result of this policy existed in the town of Poughkeepsie, barely twenty miles to the west of Wingdale where they had closed another hospital shortly after the closing of Wingdale.
Poughkeepsie was a bigger town than Wingdale, they even had a park in the center of town, a park, which, at that time, was crowded with the former patients of both hospitals. An administrator of Wingdale, with whom I became friends, pointed them out to me and explained that there was a dispensary in Poughkeepsie where the patients, who just sat around in the park all day, could go to get their medications. But these were mental patients, I remarked, how do they know to get their medications and what happens when they don’t. The administrator just shrugged and that shrug is the whole story of mental health care in this country.
Yes, Coulter is right, we must fix the metal health care system but Coulter is also wrong because the lack of care of the mentally ill didn’t put a gun in the hands of Aaron Alexis, our lax gun laws did that. The Maryland Department of Mental Health didn’t put a gun in the hands of Aaron Alexis, the National Rifle Association and it’s director Wayne LaPierre did that, but Coulter never mentions this. There is not a word in her vociferous column about guns, only about mental health. Yes, people kill people, but it’s a hell of a lot easier if they have guns
I agree with Coulter, that fixing our mental health programs is of primary importance, so why if she feels that way is she so against Obamacare, which will be the first program to address mental health as a problem in thirty years? She is like the lightweights who are against abortion, but fight contraception with every once of their limited intellect.
There is no doubt that we need competent treatment for mentally ill people. It will go a long way to keeping them from turning into dangerous killers. What will go a hell of a lot further, in keeping them from becoming mass murderers, is to keep guns out of their lunatic hands.