because elliot rodger convinced them that there was not a problem, a san diego that enough, and fine, go back to the business and all is good, and we are not the mind police. this is the problem, because it is difficult even for the best mental health trained professionals to predict violence and let alone somebody else who is not this the mental health arena, but when you have a person who is albeit socially awkward and socially awkward and premeditated planning and reality testing and recognizing that my wishes and desires to kill people may not be in line with society, i have to say x-y-z to get by, this is tricky for someone to get committed. and the other issue is about the involuntary commitment laws and when we make it difficult for the people to get help and deinstitutionalization where we no long ver the state hospitals and the facilities available for long-term care, and this is someone who posed a chronic risk and so there is not an acute
the hospitals were closed down. but when those people wound up in cities like new york there were sros, cheap housing plagueses. if you were discharged with a prescription bottle and one bottle of medicine to help you. itch y if you lost your apartment on the upper west side you could walk around the corner and find a cheap apartment. in the 70s and 80s when the co-legislation was founded the housing dried up. sros, lost 100,000 units. as a result snuff. what? condo, buildings. my first apartment was a former s sro. a woman, sunny was a distressed looking woman was standing in front of my building one day. one bright sunny day, this woman standing there, kind of, you know, clearly, with a thousand yard stare in her eye. i said may i help you. thought there was something wrong with her. she said i used to live in this
beginning of what i call the backlash era. you had a very sophisticated campaign on the right to sort of tell people the reason homelessness hasn t gone away. there is something wrong with the people. that they have made bad choices. they re fundamentally different than you and i. so, people begin to buy into that. and see homeless people not so much as people. but as pathologies. some of them are, and i would look to fienend find your word preventible homeless. some one has a job. they may be barely making end meet. they have a home. they have an address. they have a lease. they have an apartment. in whatever the five boroughs or where they may live. then they lose the lease for whatever reason. and then there are other people who, and, and, correct me if i ve am wrong, back in the 80s when the state seemed to be emptying out all mental health facilities. that is the great lens you should look at it through. earlier than that in the 60s and 70s, the deinstitutionalization,
healthcare system from the 70s until now such that you literally can t get people help even if you did refer them we haven t the resources to deploy. we don t have community mental health centers that are funded appropriate leave. we have no communication about potential violence from clinicians and the legal system. this fellow who hold a hostage now has a history dating back to just december 22nd he was arrested again for harassing and a history of killing a dog according to one of his neighbors. martha: how do you kill a dog and be up on menacing charges and still be able to have a gun and not have any intervention. i feel like there is so much government intervention in people s lives, jonah. when it comes to this kind of thing it s woe, hands-off. i agree entirely with dr. ablow on this. there is a wonderful book called madness in the streets about the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. in the 1970s we had gone too far
fired her weapon, fatally wounding one of the violent attackers. the other fled. every republican on the committee insisted that there was absolutely nothing they could do to reduce in any way the number of people massacred in our schools, or our movie theaters or shopping malls. they all believe that is not a job for senators. that is a job for psychiatrists. we need to ask whether years of deinstitutionalization of the mental health population has left america more vulnerable. perhaps it is time to consider our background check laws to see if they need to be updated, screen out the people who are subjected to court-ordered out patient mental health treatment. no mental health professional was actually asked to speak at that hearing. and so we will now partially put together the panel of witnesses