NYAPRS Note: Members of ACMHA (the American College for Mental HealthLeadership) have taken an inspiring lead in galvanizing our national
mental health and addiction recovery communities to take action in the
wake of last Friday’s horrific tragedy. ACMHA President Ron Manderscheid
wrote the powerful call to action below and former President Eric
Goplerud is organizing two phone calls this week to organize us to take
the next steps.
* Tuesday Noon EST
* Thursday at 5 pm EST.
* Call in number: 218-339-4600 code 426443
Please circulate this widely!
It is time for the mental health and substance use leadership,
behavioral health clinicians, consumers, families and advocates to act
together to help end the violence and self-mutilation we as a nation
encourage. Ron Manderscheid has written movingly about the need to halt
these tragedies.
The victims, their families and all of our children and communities must
be comforted. Mental health and substance use clinicians are often at
the forefront helping in the aftermath of these too frequent massacres.
How could we in the behavioral health community resolve to change this
social environment of destruction?
Would you be willing to work with me to turn Ron’s eloquent brief into a
sign-on letter from the behavioral health community to President Obama
and the Congressional Leadership? To recruit leaders in the behavioral
health field to encourage their colleagues and friends to start add in
letters to their local Congressional delegations, governors and state
legislators? There have been 7 mass killings in the US this year.
I’d like to schedule a couple of calls this week to determine how to go
forward as a field (as busy as this week is, no time could work for
everyone).
If you are interested and able, please call on Tuesday at noon EST or
Thursday at 5 pm EST. Call in number. 218 339 4600. 426443. Please
invite others to join, and feel free to forward Ron’s profound appeal
and this note to others.
A Time to Cry for the Innocents, Then Act
December 15, 2012 by Ron Manderscheid
We must grieve for the Innocents in Newtown, and we must now take action
The chasm is unbridgeable between our preparations for the current
Holiday Season and the killing of the Innocents today in Newtown,
Connecticut. I am certain that, tonight, most of us in America are
confronted with and deeply concerned about this rip in the fabric of a
typical American community. It could be your; it could be mine. Without
a doubt, there is no greater tragedy in a society than losing its young,
its own future, so needlessly and so senselessly. Such actions strike at
the very heart of who we are and who we hope to become.
So we must grieve-for the families who lost the Innocents, for the
families of their teachers who were lost, for the Newtown community, and
for America itself. Today was a very, very difficult day for all of us.
When threatened this way, we turn to our families, our communities, and
our faith. Each provides us needed support at such times of great
difficulty.
But we owe the Innocents much, much more than just our crying. They
also deserve our action to find and implement solutions to these social
dilemmas of our time.
We must come to terms with the fact that 13 years of war in Iraq and
Afghanistan have changed us and our society in ways that we do not yet
fully understand. One only needs to turn on a television to view
multiple murders each night. Or, just play a video game, and one can
participate in several thousand “kills” over the course of an hour. Each
day, there are 32 murders in America. Our social integration is ebbing
away, and we are rapidly becoming inured to violence and death. In an
era of global, instant communication, we are more distant than ever from
each other. We must recognize these glaring symptoms and act.
What can we do? We can begin our own road to recovery by taking several
major steps that have been very obvious for quite some time:
Immediately ban assault weapons and pistols, such as the Glock. Our
Founding Fathers and the Second Amendment never envisioned that we would
be using this right to kill each other. Assault weapons were designed
for the battlefield, not our closets. We must not be distracted from
this objective by the National Rifle Association and the ideology it
promotes.
Immediately set about developing new standards for our entertainment
industry. Violence and death are projected through every venue. Our
movies, television, video games, and music all exude violence and death
If possible, computer animations have made this violence ever more
horrific. We absolutely must change this deplorable situation.
Immediately set about rebuilding our local communities.One’s community
should be a place of support and refuge, rather than of fear. One should
not have to fear going to school and being killed. Sociologists have
known for centuries that social integration and support do reduce
conflict and violence. Good social integration also reduces trauma and
its negative effects, including mental illness. The UK has already
incorporated this thinking into its approach to health; we must do the
same.
Immediately double the capacity of city and county behavioral healthcare
systems. All who work in the social service fields know that it is
virtually impossible to get mental health care for many people who
desperately need it. Only about a third of those with moderate illness
and two thirds of those with severe illness ever receive any care at
all. Why? Because our city and county systems lack the fundamental
resources and capacity to deliver much needed care. The Affordable Care
Act provides a wonderful opportunity to change this deplorable
situation; we must do it.
Immediately initiate training to recognize the signs of mental illness
and to promote help-seeking when needed. Most students go through high
school and college without a single hour of training about mental
illness, its signs or its treatment. We can’t expect people to step
forward or to seek help for a family member with mental illness when we
don’t even provide them the rudimentary tools to do so. We know how to
do this today; we must.
Yes, we must grieve for the Innocents, just as we grieved for those lost
in Tucson, Aurora, and Portland. But, this time, our grieving must have
a direction and purpose to galvanize action. The Innocents expect
nothing less of us.