GruntDoc on why the Virginia Tech shootings can happen again:
Here in Texas, there’s a great emphasis on personal liberty (”It’s not against the law to be crazy”), and that’s good the vast majority of the time. There is indeed an emergency mental health code for the psychotic, deranged and suicidal, and it’s not easy to utilize. There is no simple form, but a multipage affidavit that has to be signed by a judge prior to holding a patient for involuntary psychiatric evaluation, and that’s assuming you can get an officer to initiate the form in the first place (mere physicians cannot). For a police officer to begin the paperwork, the patient must be in imminent danger of harm to self or others due to mental illness.And, there’s the rub. As the patient is in an ED, the cops tell us’they’re not in imminent danger, as they’re here in the ED’, and they refuse to initiate a hold . . . they’re just not going to even try.
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- Infant mental health
- Mental illness and voting
- Cardiac cath causes mental illness?
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Despite the love of “personal liberty” in Texas, that state prohibits people with a whole lists of diagnoses from purchasing firearms. Considering that any psychiatrist worth his lava lamp can diagnose anyone with something, that is a highly questionable prohibition, even if without an effective means of enforcement.
I have practiced psychiatry in a couple of states, and the most workable system is that which allows any liscensed physician to hold someone for up to 72 hours, with some involvement of officialdom for continued confinement after that.
I have a real problem with restricting people’s future rights, such as gun ownership, on one of these temporary holds having been executed, as they tend to be executed quite freely and often based on complaints of others which turn out to be factitious.
Sometimes they are executed on patients who want and are requesting psych admission because the ER doctor wants to forstall refusal of admission by the psych hospital. They think they have to take them that way.
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