Connect the dots early

Anyone who shoots up a military base, an elementary school or a movie theater, or walks up to a member of Congress and pulls the trigger, is deeply disturbed. Before he gunned down 12 people Sept. 16 at the Washington Navy Yard, Aaron Alexis spoke of insomnia and hallucinations. He told police that he heard voices and that people were chasing him and microwaving him through the walls of his Newport, R.I., hotel.

And? What exactly were police supposed to do with that information? You can’t lock someone up just because they hear voices. Or, as one Newport police officer told the Washington Post, “People make a complaint like that to us all the time.” A sergeant did call military police at the local naval station and fax them the report. It’s not clear whether anyone there followed up.

“No one connects the dots. People live and work in silos,” said Carolyn Wolf, senior partner at the Abrams Fensterman law firm in New York and its director of mental health law practice. She specializes in getting people the mental health care they need and in setting up systems to recognize mental health issues that could sprout into workplace or campus violence.

But the tragedy is that those dots are connected after a bloodbath. Our challenge is to find a way to make those connections before that quiet rage and anguish become a lethal burst of gunfire.

It won’t be easy. Not everyone who hears voices is dangerous.

Spend an afternoon at a downtown park.You’ll see the man in pressed Bermuda shorts and a fine Panama hat talking to himself and his skim latte. You’ll see the woman with the shopping cart screaming obscenities into the night air. You’ll see the woman who smiled at me and then spit in my face.

Do all of these people pose a threat? Probably not. But we have no mechanisms to know.

Wolf believes that the key to connecting these dots is building oversight teams that can discern the big picture.

“It’s a mechanism like we do with terrorism. If you see something, say something,” she said.

This works well on college campuses.

Wouldn’t a system like that cost a fortune?

“So much money goes to so many things that aren’t really a question of life or death,” she said. “This is a question of life or death.”

Good point. The massacre at Virginia Tech-besides taking 32 lives and permanently scarring hundreds more-cost taxpayers about $48.2 million. That’s according to the Center for American Progress, a liberal D.C. think tank that analyzed Seung Hui Cho’s April 16, 2007, attack by sifting through the legal bills, university staffing costs, police costs, hospital bills and autopsy receipts.

Cho needed mental health care. Would have been cheaper to make sure he got it, right?

We’ll have to get funding for lots of support staff, spread public awareness and change centuries of stigma, and we need to demolish some of the privacy laws that prohibit real cooperation when it comes to helping people with mental illness.

And you thought requiring background checks for gun purchases was hard.

Editorial, Pages 10 on 09/23/2013

Upcoming Events