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I hear a lot of talk in the media about rhetoric, but not much on how to truly *help* the severely mentally ill who are unstable AND their peers/families. I mean, we talk so much in schools about how to resist peer pressure and drugs and the like, but what's being done to teach older children about mental illness in schools?

Maybe focusing on a few of Sarah Palin's webpages, as the media is wont to do, makes us more comfortable than facing the unalterable REALITY that mental illness isn't caused by bad parenting or too much tv. Likely you can't talk these folks into killing with a simple website and more frightening still, you cannot talk them sane with one, either.

I can respect what Ms. Flanagan is trying to say about respectful discourse, but I think there are limits to this line of logic. I think better insurance rules, more psychiatric beds and MOST important, better psychiatric medicines and the genetic testing option are important discussion points. But if we don't work on countering the stigma of mental illness, people won't seek treatment, either. :)

Thanks for highlighting the post at "Teacher in a Strange Land." I couldn't agree more about the influence of media. As I wrote in the blog, even simple things like song lyrics and mixing sexiness with showmanship can influence innocent kids by developing a taste for the limelight and pushing them to experience things they barely understand.

There's mental illness and there's susceptibility and they are, of course, two different things. The shooter in AZ, however, joins a long list of mentally ill folks--Timothy McVeigh, Harris & Klebold, Seung-Hui Cho, Omar Farouk Abdulmatallib-- who took lives, believing that their cause was divine, just or merely the solution to unresolvable unhappiness and boredom. Monstrous behavior comes from a combination of factors, not merely a stand-alone "chemical imbalance."

I'm not saying you can "talk people sane." Only that there's a sliding spectrum of influence on the most susceptible--children, who have few mental filters around the lure and thrill of violence, sex, power, immortality, etc. It's easy to get the attention of the most unstable people.

My concern would be that we're all microanalyzing on some chick in Alaska's website, and not the devastating horror that happens DAY TO DAY in the family lives of those who have mental illness. And we're not really concentrating on finding new psychiatric drugs or figuring out "what works." Literally when someone becomes obviously mentally ill AND accepts help, it can take years to find the right combination of drugs and I have news for ya: they're usually not covered by insurance even now, and insurance specifically in the past has placed lifetime limits on mental health care.

Why aren't liberals like yourself discussing the fact that the OBAMA administration is the only one in recent memory looking for medical parity?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/health/policy/30mental.html?_r=1

I guess I'd rather concentrate on what can be done to help the root causes rather than chase the "rhetoric" thing, which (aside from supremely awful utterances) is more or less in the eye of the beholder.