<p>“According to an Equusearch report from January 2011, Quick’s parents said their son disappeared after saying he was depressed and wanting to commit suicide. He was later found on the Lone Star College Cy-Fair campus, staying inside a tent.”</p>
<p>You can get help, but mental health care is not covered by insurance the same way physical health is.
We need equity for mental health coverage.
Because there aren’t blood tests or lab tests for mental disorders it is also more difficult to diagnose & treat as well as being more expensive.</p>
<p>emeraldkity - my insurance covers mental health just as it does the services of any other specialist. Every policy I’ve had for the past 18 years has.</p>
<p>^^^^^Ours doesn’t. You are limited to so many visits a year and it is for 15min medication management visits, not therapy. ( Not to mention, very,very few Drs accept it- & many psychiatrists in Seattle don’t take any insurance) Ours is Blue Cross Boeing group policy.
Group therapy is not covered, nor is any type of therapy involving more than one patient.</p>
<p>However if you are hospitalized that is covered a little better.</p>
<p>I would love to have better coverage, where do you find this insurance and is it affordable?</p>
<p>Our insurance also covers mental illnesses the same as other illnesses. Unfortunately, our deductible and out-of-pocket maximums are very high, so we are looking at a $10,000 bill for our son’s recent hospital stay plus out-patient group therapy. I guess we will pay it off over a few years.</p>
<p>I think why Obamacare hasnt kicked in on my policy yet, is that it was negotiated under a union contract that went into effect before the Affordable care act did. The next contract it should reflect the change.
I hope?</p>
<p>Even with the perpetrator apparently having a history of depression, I’m always wary of casting violent events as solely “mental health crises.” One does not have to be mentally ill to commit horrible crimes, and conversely, people who are mentally ill are not significantly more likely to commit violent acts. In fact, the relationship between mental illness and violence is seen on the victim side, not the perpetrator side. Are there people with mental illness who are also violent? Of course. However, this does not mean that all (or even most) violent people are mentally ill or that all (or even most) mentally ill people are violent or that violence is linked to mental illness. The number of homicidal people with depression is very small in comparison to the number of people with depression overall. </p>
<p>Yes, we should definitely promote better mental health coverage and treatment, but doing it because of “those people are violent” is misguided at best. Better mental health treatment can prevent disability, improve quality of life and functioning, reduce loss of life (but mainly through suicide prevention), reduce risk of secondary conditions, etc., etc. It’s great. But measure it by homicide prevention, and you’ll likely get small changes showing letter effect, because your entire focus is on the non-occurence of something that was rare to begin with.</p>
<p>Emeraldkity, it’s a package through my employer via cigna…and yes, it is very affordable. I don’t know about group therapy, but psych and therapist visits and meds, yes. </p>
<p>Psych - we are assuming he has a mental illness, and yes, I understand it’s an assumption, because he chooses to speak through a monkey puppet that he carries around with him and has been fantasizing about stabbing people to death since he was 8, and was very pleased with himself when he WAS able to stab multiple people. In 2011 he allegedly suffered from depression and became suicidal.</p>
<p>Also, evidently the authorities feel strongly that he’s mentally ill because he’s being held in a mental illness facility rather than a jail, and he was unable to meet with the judge, and they cited mental reasons.</p>
<p>Huh? You disagree with the first statement? Everyone who commits a horrible crime is mentally ill? In the legal sense? Because if they are all mentally ill why don’t we just covnert every jail into a hospital. </p>
<p>Newsflash - some people are just bad without being mentaly ill. I wouldn’t automatically label every gang memeber who kills a rival drug dealer over turf, or everyone who shoots a guard in a robbery, or everyone kills their spouse “mentally ill”. Those are all “horrible crimes” in my book.</p>
<p>p1: “there is a giant problem with these mass shooting. Something has to be done today”
p2: “Ok, well they all involve mentally ill people who were obsessed with violent video games and movies”
p1: “We cant discuss that!”</p>
<p>^^^
I assume because you didn’t mention my post because you aren’t responding to it. Because I made a very specific comment about something you wrote which, IMO, is nonsense. Or maybe I am misinterpreting your post, because to me it seems to imply that every horrible criminal is mentally ill.</p>
<p>Let me simplify it -
I know mentally ill people commit crimes. I think it is a subject worth discussing.
I also believe a lot of crime is committed by people who are not mentally ill, but just not very good people.</p>
<p>Is there some problem with those statements?</p>
<p>Of the set of crimes we are talking about, they seem all to be committed by mentally ill people. If you’d like to modify “all” in that sentence to 90%, go ahead. </p>
<p>No one is talking about the woman who poisons her elderly neighbor so she can steal her social security check. Or the robber who shoots a bank guard. Or someone who shoots an ex. </p>
<p>Of the mass shooters, they are mostly mentally ill and obsessed.</p>
<p>Psych - I am very well aware that most people with mental illnesses are not violent and not dangerous. In fact, if we go by the DSM, most everybody is mentally ill. Mental health is like physical health. You can be for the most part a healthy person, but have a little blood pressure problem that is controlled by medicine. Yes, I get it.</p>
<p>I am also aware, as argbargy has pointed out, that almost without exception people that commit these crazy (and I mean crazy) multi-victim, violent, bloody assaults are mentally ill, i.e. major mental health disorder.</p>
<p>True, but these are a very, very small segment of crime and violent crime. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t horrifically sad and terrible, but it’s really hard to set up something to accurately predict and prevent the occurrence of something very rare. That’s one reason why we can’t reliably “profile” for these crimes. Also, mental health professionals aren’t psychics–we can only go on what a client tells us and behavioral risk factors, and that’s not a very exact science (interestingly, one of the biggest risk factors for violence? Substance abuse. Guess we better lock up all those pot heads and alcoholics, stat). The question is how many false positives are worth it to prevent the true positives. Should we lock up all people with depression? Schizophrenia? Autism? Many of the red flags we see are only seen in hindsight because we know the horrible crime happened and are looking for answers. </p>
<p>(Interestingly, in the mass murder case where the mental health professional did report suspected homicidality–James Holmes–it wasn’t acted on by the police, which seems strange)</p>
<p>psych - I agree, “it’s really hard to set up something to accurately predict and prevent the occurence of something very rare.”</p>
<p>Agree completely. And no. I’m not for incarcerating substance abusers and institutionalizing the mentally ill.</p>
<p>I think these horrible incidents are part of a bigger picture of where our culture is driving us. Honestly, I don’t think they can be prevented in our current environment of lax moral standards, absorption into video games and fantasy, our unwillingness to accept personal responsibility…I can go on and on…but I don’t think that any law passed is going to prevent these things.</p>
<p>I believe that there was also an issue with Seung-Hui Cho mental health treatment. And I think Loughner just stopped going. </p>
<p>I think we need to think about repealing the part of FERPA that uses the guise of confidentially to keep parents in the dark about their children’s medical condition. My recollection was that James Holmes’ parents suspected that there were problems but could get no information from the university. </p>
<p>We are talking about limiting peoples’ rights anyway. I think we need to have a conversation about allowing false positives. As Dylan Quick showed, someone who is mentally ill and takes the time to plan will have no issue killing multiple people regardless of weapon.</p>
<p>I don’t know. I don’t like the idea of parents accessing medical information against the child’s will. It may lead to fewer people seeking help.</p>
<p>I think one thing that might help is that if a counselor, therapist, psychiatrist or parent notifies police that someone is behaving in such a way that makes them concerned for the safety of others, the police should follow up on it with a mental health deputy.</p>