How Obama’s Gun Law Executive Action Hurts People With Mental Illness
S.E. Smith January 7 2016
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Sadly, the only time people in the US discuss the dire state of mental health services across the nation is in the wake of a horrific act of mass violence, creating a feedback effect. People don’t talk about mental illness because they don’t find it relevant, even though 20 percent of the population experiences symptoms of mental illness; their primary associations with mental illness are of severe psychiatric crisis and pop culture stereotypes; acts of violence occur and they erroneously blame them on mentally ill people; and suddenly mental health services matter, until a few weeks pass and the issue fades to the background again. Cultural forces like this explicitly link mental health and violence, underscoring dangerous social attitudes.
Viewing mentally ill people as a threat means that life is very dangerous for people with mental health conditions in the United States. Over 50 percent of fatal police shootings in many areas of the country involve mentally ill people. Mentally ill people fear interactions with police, and often their friends and family mistakenly call law enforcement for help during psychiatric crisis — in part because there are no agencies designed for mental health response, and thanks to cuts to mental health services, more people end up in crisis than ever before. Few cities have explicit mental health crisis teams embedded within law enforcement agencies and trained to deal with people struggling with symptoms like paranoia and breaks with reality, and consequently, mentally ill people are often shot within minutes of law enforcement arrival on scene even though the only danger is to themselves.
Mentally ill people are also heavily profiled — while the ADA bars discrimination on the basis of disability, it doesn’t stop many federal agencies from refusing clearance to people with documented mental health conditions, which acts to discourage people from seeking treatment. Mentally ill people can experience harassment in the workplace as well as subtle discrimination like not being considered for promotions, and they are subject to profiling in housing and social settings as well. Being outed as mentally ill can be extremely dangerous, one reason people are extremely cautious about where, how, and when they seek treatment.
Which brings us to a key aspect of Obama’s reforms, and also one of the most troubling. The measure now requires the Social Security Administration to supply information about mentally ill people to the background check system, meaning that those receiving government benefits who have been deemed ‘unfit’ by dint of mental illness or legal incapacity (such as those under guardianship, a controversial practice in the US, in which all rights and autonomy are stripped by court order), will now have their data made available to anyone who can run a background check. This is a clear violation of patient privacy — which is why the Department of Health and Human Services has updated its rulemaking on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which among other things specifies measures for patient privacy.
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The fact that people in the US only care about mental health in the context of convincing themselves that mentally ill people will shoot them is a grim testimony to their [American] humanity, and to the failures of the social safety net. Even US progressives primarily address mental health services in the context of restricting their freedoms in the name of preventing violent crime, as seen by this initiative and the broad support for it among the Democratic campaigners for president, including Senator Bernie Sanders, widely considered a leftist in the context of US politics. President Obama has made a grave mistake here, and mentally ill people will pay the price.
http://globalcomment.com/how-obamas-gun-law-executive-action-hurts-people-with-mental-illness/