Why psychiatrists can't stop mass killings

[Ronin13]

I read this article this morning and thought it was very well written, thought out, and researched. It should be expanded to "Why our mental health industry in this country is hamstrung by the ACLU", and "Why police shouldn't get the blame because they're not psychologists."
Either way, it does address the issue that Elliot Rodger was under the care of a psychiatrist, and was getting treatment, and it still wasn't enough to keep him from doing what he did. Bottom line- Evil people will do evil things, no matter what we try to do to stop them. Hence why I carry.
Anyway, here's the article (sorry for the length):

More money for mental health won’t stop these mass murderers.With the Santa Barbara killings, mental health is again the central focus. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) is pushing for more resources on mental health “to make sure that these kinds of horrific, insane, mad occurrences are stopped and the Congress will be complicit if we fail to act.”
But the killer, Elliot Rodger, had already been receiving top-quality mental-health counseling for years. One of his psychiatrists, Dr. Charles Sophy, is nationally known and medical director for the LA County Department of Children and Family Services.
Rodger had, in fact, been seeing multiple psychiatrists. Some blame the sheriff’s deputies for not doing more to investigate an initial complaint, but Rodger’s psychiatrists ultimately had the responsibility to ensure he had the proper treatment. It’s not obvious how more money would have helped.
It’s very common for mass killers to be seeing psychiatrists before their attacks, including Ivan Lopez (the recent Fort Hood shooter), Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook elementary), James Holmes (“Batman” movie theater) and Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech).

For Lopez, the Army psychiatrist who last saw him found no “sign of likely violence, either to himself or to others.” In Holmes’ case, while his psychiatrist warned University of Colorado officials about his violent fantasies, she “rejected the idea” that the threat was sufficiently serious for him to be taken into custody.
Seung-Hui Cho was deemed “an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness.”
Yet he was determined not to be “an imminent danger to others as a result of mental illness.” The judge stated it was not necessary to have him involuntarily committed.
Again, these prominent mass killers certainly didn’t lack mental health care. The problem was that even top psychiatrists failed to identify real threats.
Yet psychiatrists have strong incentives to get the diagnosis right. Besides their own professional pride and desire to help, they have legal obligations to inform authorities of a threat. Families of those killed by Holmes sued his psychiatrist for not recommending that Holmes be confined. Similar legal action may face Rodger’s psychiatrists.


The psychiatric profession is aware that it is very difficult for mental-health professionals to accept that a patient could pose a serious violent threat. They tend to deny it to themselves. In other words, psychiatrists frequently underestimate threats to safety.
The problem is severe enough that a whole academic literature is devoted to it. Explanations include psychiatrists trying to prove their fearlessness and becoming desensitized to the dangers. It’s possible that added training to understand these unusual cases may help improve their diagnoses.
Yet it’s also simply hard to predict these extremely rare outcomes.


Monday morning quarterbacking is always easy. What seem like obvious telltale signs in retrospect are not so obvious before the attack, even to the experts.
Nor is there much benefit to overly stigmatizing mental illness generally. Extremely few of those with mental illness go on to become killers. Even among schizophrenics, we’re talking about a rate that is much less than one person out of every 100,000.
Renée Binder, the president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association, advocates “a Gun Violence Restraining Order, a mechanism that would allow those closest to a troubled individual to act when there are warning signs or indications that person is at risk for violence.”


Sorry, that won’t really help. Set aside the fact that half of Rodger’s killings were stabbings; it’s just not hard to get guns illegally in this country — especially if you’re willing to spend months or years planning your attack, as virtually all of these killers do.
There are no cheap or easy answers. If someone poses a true danger to others, why not lock them up? Or provide outpatient care-givers to monitor them?
No one wants a dangerous person to have a weapon. But our mental-health system simply can’t be the last line of defense. There are just too many mistakes. Potential victims need to be able to defend themselves.
http://nypost.com/2014/06/01/why-psy...-mass-killers/

[Aloha_Shooter]

The largest issue is that a significant number of these psychologists (I'd like to say most but I haven't done an actual survey to establish percentages) are quacks, pure and simple. I flipped through a lot of the papers or projects when I was visiting my sister for her doctoral graduation and was appalled at what so many of her clinical psychology peers considered good research. A lot of them simply assumed statistical correlation == causation (FALSE!) and I even saw room to question a lot of their statistical correlations. Even worse, after actually meeting her classmates, my simple observation was that they seemed to suffer from "issues" more often or more severely than the general population (sis agreed).

I've had friends who benefited from mental counseling but have all kinds of qualms about regarding it as a "science" and therefore looking to it for cures or preventatives.

[Ronin13]

The largest issue is that a significant number of these psychologists (I'd like to say most but I haven't done an actual survey to establish percentages) are quacks, pure and simple. I flipped through a lot of the papers or projects when I was visiting my sister for her doctoral graduation and was appalled at what so many of her clinical psychology peers considered good research. A lot of them simply assumed statistical correlation == causation (FALSE!) and I even saw room to question a lot of their statistical correlations. Even worse, after actually meeting her classmates, my simple observation was that they seemed to suffer from "issues" more often or more severely than the general population (sis agreed).

I've had friends who benefited from mental counseling but have all kinds of qualms about regarding it as a "science" and therefore looking to it for cures or preventatives.

Wow... that's kinda scary right there. I would be inclined to agree, though. Growing up I had issues in school, so naturally, what do 90's parents do? Send me off to a head shrinker who (surprise!!!) diagnoses me with ADD and hands my mother a script for ritalin. Go to school, there are at least 8 more kids in my class of 25 that are also on ritilin. Not saying all psychologists don't know what they're doing, but when so many are so quick to just throw drugs at the problem, then we have issues. I think that is part of the problem here.

[BREATHER]

My major in college(late in life) was Forensic Psychology, it was the quickest direction to take to get an undergraduate degree using the credits I recieved after I left my military service. Anyhow, this curriculum included several counseling and victimology classes. All the books that were required in the counselling classes started on the first page by saying MOST people that get into "the helping profession" did so because they were seeking help.... Red Flags....After seeing these proffs and the students that were there, damn,,, again red flags... Psycholgy is a "lite science" pretty much anyone can get a Phd. Most are LIBS. Most do not have a lick of common sense. AND there is the obligation to warn, but the pros can't see past the charm. These kinds of murderers can be pretty charming. It a flawed system with little or no checks and balances, kind of what the present administration is attempting to do away with.

[davsel]

Simple fix: Make it easier for a family member to commit a relative - like it once was.
It does not take a Psychology degree to determine if your son is nuts.
Lock 'em up.

[dan512]

It would be neat is psychologists were mind readers. It would be super cool if cops were there to stop a crime before it happened. But that will never happen. Sure we can look for red flags and themes to predict human behavior ( in the Gavin DeBecker sense) but it's playing the odds at best, and impossibly restrictive at worst.
How many of us have ever gone through a hard time where, if we had been talking to a third party who may not know us (read super liberal, guns are bad therapist or psychologist) would recommend our guns be confiscated and we be locked up? It's a tightrope walk between locking everyone up or the occasional tragedy. This is one of those price for a free society things.
The best (and perhaps only) recourse we have is to raise good children who know right and wrong and try to protect those we love.

[hurley842002]

Simple fix: Make it easier for a family member to commit a relative - like it once was.
It does not take a Psychology degree to determine if your son is nuts.
Lock 'em up.

You cannot be serious?

[davsel]

Afraid so.

Psychos were let out onto the streets in the '80s because big pharm said drugs were the answer.
Psychos go off their meds.
Psycho meds all have possible dangerous psycho side effects.

Psychology degrees are relatively easy to attain.
50 minutes in a psychologist's office, where the psycho knows they're being evaluated, is not a smart way to determine if someone is a danger to themselves or society.
Family members are in a better position to determine on a continual basis whether or not their relatives have lost their minds.
Look at the history of the recent shooters. Their families knew they were nuts.

Get them off the street by locking them up.

[DavieD55]

The thing that gets me is that we keep asking the same people to fix a problem who have this nation on the brinks of economic collapse and financial ruin. We keep asking the same people who want to disarm the American people to fix the mental health system. This administration along with it's bureaucratic gestapo is out of control and should not be trusted to fix anything period.

[Great-Kazoo]

Simple fix: Make it easier for a family member to commit a relative - like it once was.
It does not take a Psychology degree to determine if your son is nuts.
Lock 'em up.

So (for arguments sake) my anti-gun family finds a shrink who has the same ideology as they do. Paper gets written outlining my paranoia and i'm gone ? GFR