I wonder how those with loved ones and friends who are emotionally or mentally ill handle it?

I believe it would be dangerous to give others the authority to force people into care,,, but I hear stories like the following and wonder if there may have been some way to prevent it


what are the options to help the ill if they dont want help before they harm others?





Sheats, 42, shot and killed her daughters on Friday, June 24. Police then shot her when she allegedly refused to drop her weapon.

According to the Associated Press, the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office released recordings of two calls placed from Sheats’ home and one call placed from a neighbor’s home.


In the first call from Sheats’ home, a woman can be heard crying, “Please! Forgive me! Please! Don’t shoot! Please! I’m sorry! Please! Don’t point that gun at her!” Another female voice can be heard trying to plead with Sheats, telling her, “I promise you, whatever you want,” before the call is disconnected. In the second call, a woman is described as weakly informing the operator that “she shot ‘em,” according to the AP.


http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/911-calls-reveal-daughters-panic-as-texas-mom-shoots-them-w211591

Yea, shame and she was a avid gun rights supporter, her family were scared of her having guns... Lots of mental illness with those gun crazy folks unfortunately not getting the help they need.

Ms, give this a reasonable, logical, not emotional thought.
Not emotional, ok.

Say you belong to a group that collects and celebrates women's fashion, in particular designer pumps. They can be expensive and dangerous literally in many ways. You are a responsible adult, your salary provides for you and your family and as a professional woman you feel they help convey your professionalism (as part of your professional wardrobe). You feel different when you wear them, empowered.
Despite all of this your friends and family just can't understand. They send you pictures of women who have fallen down stairs, broken limbs, had car accidents.... because they were wearing heels. It happens, they do actually care about your wellbeing and don't want to see you hurt. Some committee takes a few higher profile examples of how heels have injured women wearing them or been used as weapons in gruesome acts of violence (possibly self defense). Instead of showing what lead up to cases where heels were used as weapons said committee shows pictures of the shoes themselves next to those wounded by them. Now said committee brings this to your local and State legislature and proposes that heels shouldbe banned and any woman or (sick) man wearing them be fined or jailed.

Would that be a fair and logical assessment of high heel shoes and what your gov't could or should be doing with/about them and their owners/wearers?

Logic and reason only.

The 'article' is a conflation of mental illness and gun control. However after reading the article there is very little little mentality, illness, mental illness, or actual fact given as evidence of the titled claim.
This lady was in and out of mental hospitals, had xyz medications in large dosages, she smoked meth and hocked her kids life savings.....nothing. I know how you FEEL, I know it's plastered all over ever type of media there is which is exactly why you need to start asking Critical Thinking questions. Don't accept prewritten talking points at face value.

this was not about the gun

my apologies for the chosen article, there are several others that do mention her history of actual mental disease


I would feel the same and have the same pondering about people walking around with such illness if she had chosen to lock her kids in a car and drown them,,,or stab them in their sleep,

although, unlike cars or other things people bring up when guns are mentioned,, their purpose is not killing and maiming

anything can be converted to that purpose but few things are DESIGNED for it,,,



I posted though to address options for the mentally ill to be helped in ways that will avoid so many flying off the hinges to take the lives of others,,,

The analogy is seriously flawed here, I don't think she'd manage to kill anybody with a heel during the family dispute, common sense dictates as MsH said... Heels weren't designed for the sole purpose of killing. She was a avid gun enthusiast with a permit and serious mental issues, what's so difficult to understand? virtually no progress has been made on mental illness over the last decade and they have no firm grasp on long term effective treatments, add the drug epidemic in full bloom, it's easy to see why there should be major restrictions on gun ownership and storage of weapons.

Msharmony.....I understand your question and my answer is I DON'T KNOW

Mental illness has many, many forms and is tremendously misunderstood in most cases.

I personally encountered this type of situation in my own family and neighborhood.
http://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#

He had a severe history of manic depression, bipolar disorder. His brother and mother were poor and didn't have access to any kind of mental health treatment. His mother (my aunt) and my mother (his aunt), called police/ambulance several times in the months leading up to this tragedy to try to get him some help. A year before, the police and hospital managed to get him into a treatment facility. He was there long enough to get the correct meds, start feeling better and was released. He was "normal" as long as he was medicated correctly, however being poor he eventually stopped taking the meds due to cost and time away from his job to meet dr appointments. (it's a vicious circle as we all know)

We simply NEED some kind of public/social medical attention to help diagnose, treat and followup with these kind of cases.
I don't have a clue how to go about this, but it needs to happen.

OT....yes, he used a gun but that is absolutely not relevant to what this topic is about. Msharmony addressed that when she stated "I would feel the same and have the same pondering about people walking around with such illness if she had chosen to lock her kids in a car and drown them,,,or stab them in their sleep," .....remember Susan Smith?

The best they can.


I think before we start limiting freedoms to people with mental illness there "should" be mandatory testing for anyone applying for or running for political office or any government position whatsoever.

Not to mention constant peer review and general voting to determine the mental illness levels of the people and processes determining the mental illness of others.

Do you know the people or tests that determined the 42 year old woman was "mentally ill?"
Not really in the linked story. And I've never met her or them.


IMO this is focusing on too small a problem asking for too large a stick.
IMO first stop gang violence.
First stop war.
Government is just a big stick. You use big sticks on big problems.

On individual problems, like one crazy lady killed her two daughters, you focus on small sticks. Like family and community.

IMO that's a huge problem with the whole "think globally, act locally" movement.
You fix global problems with big sticks.
You fix local problems by your own actions.
When you keep reading small local problems happening all over the place you start seeing global problems and want a big stick to solve any, absolutely, that may possibly pop up since you think you see a global cause.

When really, for crap like this all you can really do is "what am I going to do to keep from losing it and harming people, how do I spot this problem in the people I know, what am I willing to take personal responsibility for."

Also

People cause harm to others all the time.
Mental, emotional, physical, social, spiritual, accidental, indirect.

Is everyone that causes harm mentally ill?
Is it taken for granted that it's the mental illness that is leading to causing harm?
IMO for all anyone knows mental illness is what keeps people from harming others it's just not strong enough sometimes, where if they were more mentally ill then they'd be less prone or susceptible to harming others..

IMO the way the sentence is written could be considered offensive by a lot of people.
I mean it could just as easily read "what are the options to help the blacks if they don't want help before they harm others?"

What Christy Sheats did was an act of evil. She did it because she wanted her husband to suffer.

To me, this is primarily another example of how people who advocate one "solution" or another, almost never manage to think the entire process and the necessary and ADDITIONAL supporting changes which need to be made, in order to make the "solution" actually work.

People who advocate for "gun control," so far at least, have not recognized what is necessary to make any of their ideas work, and the people who insist that total gun freedom will do the trick also entirely fail to recognize that THAT course ALSO requires a great deal of additional action, in order to make sure that people who have ready access to weaponry, are capable of handling it responsibly and sanely.

We tend to get partial laws passed. Require medical people to care for others in need, but refuse to recognize and fund them so that they can. We work to keep wages low for the sake of businesses, but refuse to do what is necessary to make it possible to hold wages down, and still have an educated, healthy labor supply.

And so on.

And yes I also know first hand what it is like to try to deal with mental problems of a number of different kinds. How none of them are easy. None of them are curable. Few of them are genuinely manageable. And all of them are wildly expensive.

But only those of us who do know first hand, are willing to vote positively to build the infrastructure needed, fund it, and require all the people who make demands about "personal rights," accept that those "rights" have REAL COSTS.

What's truly ironic recently, is that the people who have chanted the loudest about how any form of publicly supported health care would result in "death panels" deciding things...


.... are ALSO the people most fanatically insisting that the ONLY option offered to those suffering from mental health issues and their relatives, who AREN'T insanely wealthy, is death.

thank you Mel,,,,

I know it would be a terrible box to open to allow people to be forced into treatment


so what about other preventive measures,,,,,I would think it may be best to steer clear of such people as much as possible, but with a loved one you don't want them to feel deserted,,,the tough love approach may just make things worse


it would have to be one of the toughest situations to be in,, loving someone that's a danger to you through the fault of illness

harm here is used in the context of the example of the story

PHYSICAL,,,,


and no,, I am asking specifically about those who physically harm others AND are suffering from mental illness

not stating that anyone harming others is suffering mental illness

I see a difference here, because mentally ill implies a potential incapacity to cope or resolve problems

'black' denotes no such potential, and requires noones 'help' as it is not a condition that anyone can do anything about,its just a racial description,

I agree wholeheartedly that "forced into treatment" is never the best option, but sometimes the only option for preventing a tragedy of some kind.
I have to admit....I also had no clue what to do for my cousin. Of course, we had no idea his illness would come to this conclusion.

Also, even if someone is wealthy they are not automatically going to find treatment or take their meds accordingly. I just wanted to clarify what my cousins' situation was.

As far as "death" being an option....that to me is absolutely a gray area. Just like a lot of things in life...it depends on the individual situation, there is no finite right or wrong option. IMO
(certainly NOT death for simply having a mental illness)

Well, my loved ones and friends blew me off. It's easier for people to ignore the mentally ill.


Uuuuummm. Anybody can go to court and ask the judge for a court order for an evaluation for someone else IF the judge is told they are a danger to themselves or someone else. If you want to make sure they get locked up just tell the judge they threaten to kill themselves. The person gets locked up and forced to talk with a Psychiatrist. I heard this from a friend. Yeah, it was a friend.

So, yes, people can do something short term but......

Long term, it is the governments problem. They don't want to spend the money on the problem so these things will continue to happen. Hey it's more important for the politicians to build their own wealth. They get armed protection so it doesn't really effect them.

Also, the US is supposedly a free country, so if the person knows how to answer the questions properly from the Psychiatrist they walk out free as you and me. They learn the proper answers from being in the system for a period of time.

So, there is no good answer until we all loose more of our freedoms. It will happen. It is just a matter of time.

FREEDOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Its really kind of funny how mental illness doesn't cause mass shootings in most countries where there is strong gun laws.

The gun sickness in the United States shames us everyday. Thinking a person needs a gun is the start of gun sickness and it just goes on from there.

It must suck to go through life with an irrational fear of inanimate objects.


As to the OP, it seems to have happened again....

Four children were fatally stabbed in suburban Memphis Friday, and their mother was taken into custody for questioning, authorities said.
The mother and the children who were killed were not identified, police said. The Shelby County Sheriff's Office got a call about a stabbing at shortly before 1 p.m., the sheriff's office said. No charges had been filed in the case as of Friday night.
"This is an egregious act of evil that has shocked us to our core," Shelby County Sheriff Bill Oldham told reporters. "I will never understand how anyone could do that."
Oldham said names would not be released until next of kin is notified. The ages of the children were not released, but the sheriff's office told NBC affiliate WMC in Memphis they were under 6 years old.""
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/4-children-stabbed-death-memphis-mother-custody-n602741

OMG! We MUST ban knives! The knives stabbed the children!

Andrea Yates, drowned her five children in
a bathtub.

gun sickness.....mmmmmmmm...


lemme just holla back at my grand pappy
and my uncles, my ex husband, his bruthas
and my sons...



man this must run in the family

I'm not sure if this just applies to Florida or is a federal law but in Fl, if you believe someone is irrational or have mental heath issues that can harm themselves or others they can be "Baker acted". This gives police the ability to bring the person in for a 72 hour mental evaluation and much longer if deemed needed.

yep


this happens a lot with the big 3

depression
schizophrenia
bi-polar


they tend to go off their meds and convince themselves
they are fine

and then slowly spiral back out of control