Gov't plays fast and loose with term 'mentally ill'
Gov't plays fast and loose with term 'mentally ill'
When Fidel Castro bullied his way into power in Cuba five decades ago, the west began to see, up close and personal, the manner in which totalitarian governments played fast and loose with the term "mentally ill." Political dissidents were routinely rounded up, and if they were not murdered in cold blood, they were deemed insane, taken to state-run mental facilities, and given a series ofelectric shock treatments that rendered them imbeciles for all intents and purposes.
In like manner, the American government under Barack Obama and Democrats who run the U.S. Senate, and their allies in ultra-liberal state governments such California, are using the term "mentally ill" in a haphazard fashion, allowing them to confiscate guns.
And you don't even have to be a patient. Merely being a family member of such a person is enough for the American Gestapo squads to seize your firearms. This news report from Bloomberg provides the details.
In psychiatric circles, the term "mentally ill" has been routinely reserved only for sickest of those with emotional disorders. Thus, a person who merely receives in-patient treatment in a mental facility for depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or post-traumatic stress disorder is not enough for the person to be considered by the medical community as "crazy" or a "lunatic."
But in the current frenzied mindset of a society that has descended into the depths of near-pathological hysterics over guns, the medical community's assessment does not go far enough. Apparently all a gun owner has to do is to get a prescription for an anti-depressant, and someone in government is ready to confiscate their guns upon allegations of the person being "mentally ill."
And woe be unto you if you are unfortunate enough to be married to such a person. The hysterical government goons will get your guns as well, even if you have nerves of steel and never had one hint of depression or anxiety in your entire life.
This is precisely the problem with allowing government to make such determinations rather than physicians. For the very same reason it is deadly folly to allow a government bureaucrat in the new Obamacare system to make these diagnoses.
A leftwing hysteric on Twitter Wednesday responded to yesterday's Examiner report on David and Lynette Phillips by declaring, "The mentally ill should not have guns anyway."
But who, exactly, determined her to be mentally ill? She was treated for two days in December at amental health facility. We were not told the reason due to privacy issues. Was she getting a medication adjustment? If so, she is not mentally ill. Was she in the throes of deep depression or panic attacks? If so, she is not mentally ill. Was she the victim of post-traumatic stress? Again, such a diagnosis does not qualify a person as being mentally ill.
Yet it was assumed by the hysterical anti-gun crusader that the woman surely must be a lunatic, a psycho, and crazy as a bed bug, or else she would not have received treatment in a mental health facility.
Such thinking is straight out of the Middle Ages. One would think that intelligent people today would know better.
The only people whom the medical community designates as "mentally ill" are those with psychosis, schizophrenia, or inverted thinking -- the symptoms of which are a break with reality, hallucinations, debilitating paranoia, an inability to function normally in society, and marked physical decline due to the inattention to personal hygiene, among other troubling symptoms.
But in a world in which the leftwing government Gestapo wishes to confiscate as many guns from the citizens as possible, the objective becomes moving the goal posts on what makes a person mentally ill. And apparently it is becoming fashionable to designate as mentally ill those who are treated for anxiety disorders, depression, post-traumatic stress, and a host of other relatively mild and treatable maladies.
That way such unfortunate persons are not allowed to own guns -- and neither can their family members. We are now becoming nothing more than a weird hybrid of Communist Cuba, Nazi Germany, Stalin's USSR, and Chairman Mao's China all rolled into one.
And so far, citizens have not done one thing to stop it.
http://www.examiner.com/article/gov-...m-mentally-ill
