Farmers Weekly Review

Nick Reiher

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. I don’t know if you were aware of that.
If not, chances are mental health issues haven’t affected you, one of your family or friends.
If you read newspapers, listen to the radio or watch non-streaming television, you know mental health issues affect all of us, including some of the increasing number of mass shootings in our country this year.
I’m not going to come down hard on the gun lobby this time. You have suggested improving mental health services instead of taking away assault weapons.
I think we need to do both, but let’s talk about mental health.
Some people are going to kill for no apparent reason. Maybe they are just evil. Maybe there’s something wrong with their wiring, or they had a head injury that screwed up their decision-making function.
The “why” is important to us. Those of us who possibly would think of doing such things, but never would, can’t understand why someone else would blast into a school, church, shopping mall or wherever and kill random people.
Maybe they were bullied and snapped. Maybe they were under a doctor’s care for a mental illness and they stopped taking medication because they felt so much better. Maybe they’re taking too much and adding alcohol.
Maybe they ran out of sessions covered by insurance. A meme shared by a psychologist offers this ray of sunshine:
“If you need some confidence … just remember that Anthem, Cigna, and Aetna do, in fact, believe you can cure your client’s severe depression in three sessions.”
For those of you who aren’t familiar with severe depression, you can’t. And you can’t even if a well-meaning family member or friend earnestly suggests you “cheer up! You have a lot to be thankful for!”
For some, going on a vacation, or a trip to the golf course or ice cream shop chases the blues. For others, those blues follow them on those trips, taking a major slice of the joy involved, if they are even able to make themselves get up and go.
My psychologist daughter reminds me that people who are severely depressed are more likely to be suicidal; victims, rather than perps of mass shootings.
That’s fair. But it still shows we need mental health services to be as easily available in our communities as assault weapons apparently are. And by the way, those paths should not cross. We need to find ways to keep weapons out of the hands of those who are most likely to hurt themselves, as well as others. Gun lobby, we can use your help there. Get behind legislation to do that. Draft your own if necessary, and we can all talk about it.
Keep that pen in your hand. Move on to convince the insurance lobby they need to join you in treating mental illness like more than a broken arm.
And then, look to your legislators. The lack of community social services comes back to haunt us – and the victims – in many ways: suicides, homelessness and crowding our jails and emergency rooms. In extreme cases, we will see these people on the news, maybe with the faces of innocents who became victims of our shortsightedness.
Because very often, social services are the first items to be cut when it’s time to trim budgets. Maybe elected officials think the problem will just go away if they don’t fund it.
“Defunding” police has become a catchphrase that, in many cases, people don’t understand. While some communities idiotically believed getting rid of their police force entirely was a good idea, there is a better description of defunding, which could be termed, “re-funding,” as in a redistribution of monies to help get the services our residents need.
If we, like many in the gun lobby, believe we need to spend more on mental health services, then let’s take part of the money we would use toward trying to outgun offenders with more police solely, and use it to fund community programs and specialists to try to help cut the problem off at the root.
So, if you hear of your elected officials locally, statewide or in D.C. wanting to trim social services, especially for the indigent, fight.
Don’t wait for legislators to propose anything like that and go to them now and propose increasing social services, knowing it would lay the groundwork for preventing tragedies that result in too many cold, dead hands, young and old, from suicide or homicide.
Drop your guns for a few moments and pick up something that can be even more powerful when used properly: a pen.
And for the rest of us, get in the game, too. There’s a good chance if you’re not personally affected by mental health issues, someone close to you is.