MelmothTheLost
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2016
- Messages
- 4,051
- Reaction score
- 4,634
Would she have been flagged as someone with issues if we had a system that did not allow guns for someone with mental health issues?
There's quite a lot in that sentence.
Firearms or not, she was clearly already well flagged in the system for many years of escalating mental health issues. She had more than a decade of significant issues and it sounds as though her mental health was deteriorating, both because her diagnosis of schizophrenia was relatively recent and because friends and family had noted that her behaviour was changing.
One thing we know in the UK is that just because someone with mental health issues does not have access to firearms does not mean they won't flip with whatever weapons are to hand. We have had a long parade of such patients going on stabbing rampage. In some ways that's perhaps even more problematic than gun rampages. Even if the US at federal or state level found the political will to find a way to prevent mental health patients from acquiring firearms, it's incredibly difficult to deny them access to a standard household item such as a kitchen knife. There have been some proposals here to outlaw the sale of kitchen and other knives with a point, thus making them much less liable to be abused for stabbings (not just in rampages but in domestic violence situations) but these have come to nothing.
It strikes me that if transgenderism was automatically treated as a mental health issue and medicated on that basis as part of a wider raft of mental health issues, rather than by prescribing all manner of transition hormones and other drugs whose interactions with psych drugs are apparently incredibly difficult to predict and monitor, then that might provide a way forward even if it's not the one the patient wants.
If she wanted hormones for transition but wasn't going to get them because, in the views of her doctors, her primary need was to treat her depression and schizophrenia, then it was always possible that she could have gone on a rampage sooner or later anyway. It's an impossible situation. Add testosterone to her drug mix and risk a massively aggressive response due to drug interplays. Deny her testosterone and risk a massively aggressive response due to anger.
Maybe she was always going to go berzerk sooner or later whatever was done or not done.