There are many ways to prevent some violent tragedies, including high-quality mental-health treatment at all levels. But calling for more involuntary hospitalizations isn’t among them.
In the wake of this weekend’s mass murder at the University of California Santa Barbra, people are again asking—as they have after each of the nation’s recent mass shootings—what could we have done to prevent this. There were obvious indications that Elliot Rodger was planning something terrible, a spectacular crime against women that he outlined in YouTube videos and a lengthy manifesto that would bring him infamy. His family was concerned enough to contact the local Sheriff’s office and ask them to perform a mental health check on their son. Sheriffs arrived to find Rodger lucid, denying intentions of violence, and described him as articulate and shy.
What they didn’t know was that he was hiding an arsenal of handguns and ammunition and a document that would later prove that he was lying about not intending violence, that in fact he had spent a year devising plan to attack a sorority house that symbolized his suffering at the hands of women who rejected him and refused him the sexual gratification he felt entitled to. After murdering seven people, injuring many others and then committing suicide the investigation immediately turned to the question of whether the Sheriffs who visited him hadn’t made a mistake in not detaining him for psychiatric observation.
The question of whether law enforcement and mental health professionals hadn’t failed in their duty to their communities by failing to forcibly detain those who would go on to commit mass shootings has been raised after most recent episodes of such violence.
Confusing Mental-Health Intervention and Violence Prevention
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