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Kansas City shooter had been committed
Unfortunately, only for six hours.
"At a Monday news conference, his sister, Kathy Cagg, spoke of how her brother had a long history of mental illness combined with alcohol abuse. He had been hospitalized in October as suicidal, but only for six hours...."
“There is no guarantee that they will be kept for 96 hours,” said Jackson County Circuit Judge Kathleen Forsyth. “Doctors can let them out any time. Sadly, there is no guarantee they’ll even let them in. Many times the hospital is full up.”
Sometimes, she said, patients are let out in a matter of hours.
...
The local state mental health hospital, Western Missouri Mental Health, had 100 inpatient adult psychiatric beds five years ago. With about $6 million in funding cuts, that number has been reduced to 75.
Moreover, prior to 2003, Missouri employed mental health coordinators in its community mental health centers statewide. These individuals were trained to go to people’s homes to help families evaluate whether a loved one needed to be committed for evaluation or care which, depending on the case, could last up to a year. The coordinators helped the family through the judicial process. In 2003, those positions were eliminated.
[Hat tip to Clayton Cramer]
Comments
The stories all seem depressingly familiar, don't they? Every person who was acqainted with the nutcase in question knew he was a ticking time bomb and none of those people were able to get "the authorities" to do a damned thing.
It is enough to make the paranoid among suspect that the Left forced emptying of the asylums with the full knowledge that the former inmates would go on shooting sprees thereby increasing the political pressure for more gun control. Do you really think it is just a coincidence that the modern gun control movement and the emptying of the asylums seemed to start about...oh...1968?
Posted by: Letalis at May 1, 2007 03:18 PM
Actually, no, the deinstitutionalization movement started in the 1950s. I think it is more likely that the random insanity on the streets caused by this made gun control in higher demand.
I'm writing a book about deinstitutionalization right now.
Posted by: Clayton E. Cramer at May 2, 2007 09:22 AM
I've heard the program attributed to the response to Thomas Sczaz's Myth of Mental Illness, and the civil rights litigations following in its wake.
David Arquette finds room to blaime Reagan
http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2007/04/17/david_arquette_follows_the_family_trade/
Posted by: W. Bailey at May 2, 2007 01:37 PM
Szasz's work (and that of R.D. Laing) are part of the problem, and the expansion of civil liberties in the 1960s and 1970s are another part of it. The decision to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill, however, predates Reagan's time as governor of California. It took a few years for the full negative effects to show up.
Posted by: Clayton E. Cramer at May 3, 2007 01:23 PM