The gunmen in many of the mass shootings in recent years shared a trait that offers a critical clue to abating future attacks.
Each showed clear signs of psychotic behavior and, had they been treated, the disasters might have been avoided, experts told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Wade Michael Page, who killed six Sikh worshippers at a temple in Oak Creek, Wis., on Aug. 5 before being shot by police and killing himself, was a heavy drinker who was so unstable after his girlfriend broke up with him years earlier that his friends feared he had committed suicide. A psychiatric nurse who lived downstairs from him in Cudahy said if one mental health professional had taken the time to examine him, “a gazillion red flags would have gone off.”
The psychiatrist treating James Holmes, the man who killed 12 and wounded 58 in a shooting last month at the premiere of a Batman movie in Aurora, Col., recently revealed she was so worried Holmes might do something violent that she contacted the police at the University of Colorado, where Holmes had studied.
Jared Loughner, who pleaded guilty last week to killing six and wounding 13 others _ including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords _ at a Tucson shopping center in January 2011, was expelled from his community college until he could provide proof that he was in psychiatric treatment.
Seung-Hu Cho, who killed 32 students and professors at Virginia Tech before killing himself in 2007, had been declared an imminent danger and was ordered by a judge to undergo psychiatric care. But he failed to appear at his appointments, and no one made certain that he complied with the court order.
“We can’t afford to keep looking the other way,” said Jon Lehrmann, a psychiatrist at Veterans Affairs in Milwaukee and acting chair of the psychiatry department at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
At least 2,956 people have been killed in 646 mass shootings over the past 35 years, according to statistics compiled by Northeastern University criminology professor James Alan Fox. Mass killings are defined as four or more deaths, not including the shooter. The numbers show no upward trend or pattern.
“Most of the public attention is directed at the headline tragedies, like the recent shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin,” said Doris Fuller, executive director of Treatment Advocacy Center, an advocacy group that pushes for stronger commitment laws.
The center estimates that about 1,600 people are killed each year by people with untreated mental illness. This does not include people who commit suicide. Those figures come from a database the center maintains of news accounts, titled “Preventable Tragedies.”
Any discussion of how to curb violence by people with mental illness makes Peter Hoeffel uneasy. He is the director of the Milwaukee chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy organization for people with mental illness and their families.
“Talk about violence in relationship to people with mental illness reinforces myths and feeds stigma,” he said.
But Steven Hargarten, chairman of the emergency medicine department at the Medical College of Wisconsin, said society needs to take a long, hard look at the reasons why so many people die at the hands of mentally disturbed people wielding guns and conduct an autopsy of sorts.
Lehrmann, the VA psychiatrist, said real reform and improvement won’t come until society eliminates the stigma of mental illness and encourages people to come forward to get treatment. Then, we have to pay for the care in the same way that we pay for other illness, he said.
Hoeffel, the mental health advocate, said patients need to be encouraged to seek care. “We have to get mental health care out of the closet,” he said. “People have to know that it is OK to talk to family or neighbors or schoolteachers about this.”
