BoatBanter.com - Scarborough gets it right

In article ,
says...

On Monday, December 17, 2012 4:02:46 PM UTC-5, iBoaterer wrote:
In article ,

says...

On Monday, December 17, 2012 11:34:25 AM UTC-5, jps wrote:

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough,

Was wrong whe he said: "The violence we see spreading...

It is not spreading, it is actually reduced from 1980-90 levels.

Here's what needs to be looked at instead of new, knee-jerk gun control laws.

http://now.msn.com/i-am-adam-lanzas-mother-says-mom-of-mentally-ill-son?

Thanks to Reagan for cutting mental health programs....

Stop being a liberal parrot.

"The law that Reagan signed was the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (LPS), passed by the legislature & signed into law in 1967 by Governor Ronald Reagan. The idea was to "stem entry into the state hospital by encouraging the community system to accept more patients, hopefully improving quality of care while allowing state expense to be alleviated by the newly available federal funds." It also was designed to protect the rights of mental patients. It was considered a landmark
of its time--a change in the attitude toward mental illness and its treatment.

The law restricted involuntary commitment, among other things. It allows people to refuse treatment for mental illness, unless they are clearly a danger to someone else or themselves. It facilitated release of many patients---supposedly to go to community mental health treatment programs.

Reagan's role, besides signing the bill, was using it as a reason to cut his budget. What Reagan did was, at the same time the bill was passed, to reduce the budget for state mental hospitals. His budget bill "abolished 1700 hospital staff positions and closed several of the state-operated aftercare facilities. Reagan promised to eliminate even more hospitals if the patient population continued to decline. Year-end population counts for the state hospitals had been
declining by approximately 2000 people per year since 1960."

This law presumed that the people released from hospitals or not committed at all would be funneled in community treatment as provided by the Short Doyle Act of 1957. It was "was designed to organize and finance community mental health services for persons with mental illness through locally administered and locally controlled community health programs."

It also presumed that the mentally ill would voluntarily accept treatment if it were made available to them on a community basis. However, because of the restrictions on involuntary commitment, seriously mentally ill people who would not consent to treatment "who clearly needed treatment but did not fit the new criteria or who recycled through short term stays -- became a community dilemma. For them, there was nowhere to go." Once released, they would fail to take meds
or get counseling and went right back to being seriously ill.

Also, unfortunately, at the time LPS was implemented, funding for community systems either declined or was not beefed up. Many counties did not have adequate community mental health services in place and were unable to fund them. Federal funds for community mental health programs, which LPS assumed would pick up the slack, began drying up in the early 1980s, due to budget cutbacks in general. The Feds shifted funding responsibility to the states.

Sources:

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~cmhsr/history.html
Reform of the Lanterman, Petris, Short Act
"

It's not as simple as your mind thinks. (pun intended)

Here you go, only a moron like you would cherry pick ONE single site as
gospel:

http://www.dailynugget.com/2004/06/r...-and-the-ugly/

State-funded mental health care wasn?t all that great in many respects,
and advocates for the mentally ill supported reform of the large state-
run psychiatric hospitals. Reform meant that inpatient institutions,
many of which had become abusive warehouses for people the state saw as
defective, would be replaced by community-based mental health centers
who could provide appropriate, personalized care for those suffering
from mental illness while the patients lived at home, with the support
of their families. The advent of effective anti-psychotic drugs made
that possible ? but that?s not what happened.

What happened is that funding for mental health at every level, public
and private, has been consistently reduced over the last 25 years. No
insurance, public or private, covers psychiatric meds or talk therapy at
the same level that it covers physical illness. I?m not saying meds are
the solution to everything ? far from it ? but people with insurance can
access medications far more easily than they can talk therapy. For most
emotional illnesses (save schizophrenia), talk therapy is just as
effective as meds, but it?s far more expensive and insurances just don?t
pay for it.

In my area, psychiatrists don?t do therapy any more unless the patient
is paying privately. Privately insured patients can see a therapist
(one on their insurance?s panel who is taking new patients) for a
limited number of visits with a much higher copay than the one charged
for a visit with me. They can more easily access medications, but it can
take three or four months to get an appointment with a psychiatrist (one
on their insurance?s panel who is taking new patients). And all this is
assuming they can acknowledge that psychiatric care and/or therapy might
be helpful to them. People with no insurance, or with public insurance
like Medicaid, have far fewer choices. And if you have public insurance
and don?t speak English? The next available appointment with a Spanish-
speaking therapist in my community is usually six months away. If you
speak Arabic, or Farsi, or Portuguese, or French? Forget it.

I can?t imagine what yesterday afternoon must have been like for the
people in the building, their families, the family of the Leeland
Eisenberg, or the police who had to manage the situation. I imagine that
they might have nightmares, anxiety, flashbacks and other symptoms. I
hope they have better access to mental health care than Mr. Eisenberg
did, but thanks to Ronald Reagan I bet they don?t.