As Americans grapple with the implications of Saturday’s shooting in Tucson, which killed six, injured 13, and left authorities alleging that it was an assassination attempt on Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, many are wondering how such a tragedy could have been avoided.
Reportedly most who came into contact with perpetrator Jared Loughner felt he was mentally disturbed, if not violent, yet he remained unknown to local mental health providers. Nobody — not his peers, not his professors, not his community college and not his parents — ever reported or sought help from any metal health services.
“To the best of our knowledge, he was never and is currently not enrolled in our system,” Neal Cash, president of the Community Partnership of Southern Arizona, the public mental health services provider for Tucson and Pima County, told the Washington Post, adding that the system would have data on anybody diagnosed with a mental ailment.
U.S. mental health law varies state to state, and although involuntary civil commitment fell out of favor long ago, Arizona has some of the most lenient commitment laws to require treatment. While many states require the plaintiff to prove an individual presents imminent danger to himself or others, Arizona’s standard is just based on a person’s “need for treatment.” Further, anybody can petition the courts to have an individual compelled to receive treatment or be institutionalized.
Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Caller that while hotlines are available for people who have concerns about an individual’s mental health, there are avenues in Arizona and in most states for involuntary treatment.
“If you are really frightened about a person not only as being harmful but just as so sick that they need treatment, you actually — in Arizona and in about half of the states — have what’s called a ‘need for treatment’ standard where you can petition the court to involuntarily have a person evaluated and treated,” Satel said.
Despite its broadly defined laws, the fact remains that in recent years Arizona has significantly cut its state mental health services. According to Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), Arizona has just 5.9 psychiatric beds for every 100,000 people — the second-worse ratio in the country after Nevada.
Nevertheless, expansive commitment laws cannot work if nobody ever reports the individual in question and, as Michael J. Fitzpatrick executive director of National Alliance on Mental Illness said, “an evaluation is never conducted or mental health services are not available.”
Aileen Kroll, legislative and policy counsel for TAC told TheDC that the best option is to seek assistance from mental health professionals.
“I think what need[ed] to happen [was] a phone call to mental health. Every area, even rural areas, have mental health systems that need to be contacted, so that he would have been on their radar screen.” Kroll said. “From everything we have heard mental health was completely unaware of this young man, and while there appear to have been many contacts to the police, the calls to the police, based on the information we have so far, did not [result] in mental health evaluations.”
According to Satel, it would have been reasonable for Loughner’s school, Pima Community College, to have petitioned for him to be evaluated and treated.
“The school seemed to have the most information documented … Over a period of months, with encounters with police, and disruptions in class, and e-mails from all these other students it seems they had a critical mass where it would have been very reasonable. But again you don’t want to point too strong a finger, as it is all much clearer in retrospect — but it would have been very reasonable for them to have tried to do this,” she said.
Had Loughner been on record as mentally unstable he might have been prevented from purchasing a gun as the he would have been flagged as ill by the National Instant Background Check System (NICS) and unable to purchase a gun under the Gun Control Act of 1968, which prohibits the possession of firearms by the mentally defective.