The Tragedy of the Connecticut Shooting

Abandoned Psychiatric Hospital

The sole cause of this tragedy is the mental illness of one person that has no correlation to the media, video games, or other external societal factors.

In the late 90s the State of CT began a program called mainstreaming thats stated goal was to empty the state mental hospitals of individuals like this who would have been institutionalized for life and put them back into society. The failed theory was these people would be able to function with adequate support (that never was properly funded) to lesson the financial burden of life time hospitalizations on the public with “lip service” to giving long term institutionalized a better quality of life.

This is the reason the shooter was not receiving appropriate treatment including hospitalization. While the general public wishes to demonize him, he is a victim of a failed social experiment that put financial savings over the interests of the individual and society as a whole.

He may land permanently in prison, rather than a hospital, but that only adds him to the statistics of the incarcerated who are there because they can not or did not get the mental health treatment needed in the outside world. These individuals make up approximately 15% of the incarcerated population, or over 1, 000, 000.

Related articles

• Conn. shooting spurs calls for more access to mental healthcare (ktvb.com)
• In the Wake of Another Mass Shooting, Let’s Talk About America’s Dangerously Gutted Mental Healthcare System (alternet.org)
• Shootings raise healthcare questions (newsnet5.com)

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