OT - No child deserves to die because of a coward.

[kota1342000]

Hope everyone in and around Newtown is holding on as best you can. This sucks, it always will, and I'm skeptical about the healing power of time. No matter what ideas and questions I pose below, this is a worthless act perpetrated by two worthless people, the shooter and the mother.
But at this point I think 3 or 4 posts here shed a bit of light on one of the pieces we've completely ignored for too damn long at least in the US.

Moderators, I'm hoping this wont stray too close to the political prohibition here. If so, that isn't my intent.

...I think hearing from Paul and LBraden is the best thing for this thread. Fixing this problem is going to take action on several different angles, including the gun control side, but mental health has been consistently ignored in the past and that is unacceptable.
So here's a set of quick questions...I TRULY hope nothing here offends, but I consider myself ignorant on what is needed and what will work. When I had contact with the seriously mentally ill, it was a bit on the "too late" side since we were bringing him or her in on the rescue.

First, where do we start? Of course I have my own ideas like actually listening to Patients, and making sure there's some kind of funding to get something done. But I don't know if I'm on the right track.

Second, I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of drugs that big pharmaceutical companies are pushing are developed with an eye towards profit margins as opposed to helping the patient. A friend taking Serzone (I think) described a mindset where it was nearly impossible to determine if she was happy for real, or being held in a "happy state" by "chemical puppet strings". Would it be better to actually focus on other treatment options instead, and what can and should we make available? Not to mention that many of these meds are so expensive they are completely out of reach for many Americans.

And lastly, what pieces are we missing in the medical infrastructure? Medical conditions and traumatic injuries have a well established pipeline for caring for patients from start to finish, but Ive seen many people on mental health holds just set aside in a separate room and left alone. I'm thinking that's unacceptable, so what pieces do we need to put in place? Patients aren't going to need cardio monitors and first round crash drugs, but what do we need?

I know that there's lots of talk about a national database of people with dangerous mental illness, but that's not going to go very far unless we back it up with help for everyone who needs it. Going down that road is just trying to separate the mentally ill from everyone else, and would be selfish, ignorant, and worthless in the extreme. In the end, we're in the same boat, and if we can't help everyone instead of trying to throw them overboard, then we deserve to sink.