About Focusing on "Mental Health"

In my Jan 16 post "Tyranny in a Velvet Glove" I said this:

    14.  Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to reaserch the causes and prevention of gun violence.

Do you know how easy it is for the DSM-V to be modified based on politics?  Congratulations, owners of multiple guns.  You can now be diagnosed as mentally-ill.

Then, just two days later, I wrote this:

So there you have it.  Now, simply believing in the Federalist (I love how they have Newspeak-ized the term "anti-Federalist" to mean "anti-Nationalist") system, and that the Federal Government might maybe be overstepping its bounds a little bit makes you a dangerous and violent criminal.

Now, I'm sure there are some who rolled their eyes and thought, "okay, now you're over reacting."

Maybe y'all should tell that to Doctor Lee Heib, MD.  Here's what she wrote (published last night):

Wait … not so fast. The problem is one of definition: Who is mentally ill?

The use of psychiatry against dissidents in the Soviet Union was one of the major human rights scandals of the 1970s and 1980s. Overt tyrants don’t need to employ psychiatry as a weapon, but establishing a dictatorship that pretends to be a republic requires a stealthy way of silencing opponents. As the Soviets discovered, not everyone is afraid to speak out, and when dissidents are perceived by the public as speaking truth, they must somehow be discredited.
So there you have it.  Not from some schlub on the internet, but from someone in medicine who can see how the SCOAMT is manipulating that profession for his own political ends.

Now, I hear you saying, "But she's not a psychiatrist, and that was the USSR.  How would she know?"

Well, the plural of anecdote is not data, but when anecdotes confirm (or seem to confirm) a prediction, then it's time to at least take a theory seriously.  So here's just one anecdote from her piece- click over to read the whole thing.

Brandon Raub, USMC veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, made quite colorful anti-war and anti-administration remarks in a Facebook page. He was subsequently drug away in handcuffs by local authorities purportedly at the request of mental health workers.

Col. Thierry Dupuis, county police chief, acted under the state’s emergency custody statute which allows a magistrate to order civil detention and psych evaluation of anyone considered potentially dangerous – i.e., he was hauled off and jailed for a “pre-crime.” He hadn’t hurt anyone. He hadn’t done anything overt except express his beliefs on paper. And anyone with a three-inch kitchen knife is “potentially dangerous.”

Mental health is a tricky issue, and no one wants true psychotics to own weapons.  However, there is often no way to find the "true psychotics" until it's too late.  So we have two choices- disarm everyone, or deal with the fact that sometimes crazy people will get their hands on weapons and do crazy things with them.

Disarming everyone is not really on the table.  Even if we wanted to do so, we would not be able to (and you can take my guns from my cold, dead hands).