Letters to the Editor
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A face to mental illness.
We humanize one set of victims and dehumanize another. The VT victims are given families, dreams and futures. The people in Iraq are not granted the same luxury. Frankly, Bush was the shooter in Iraq, walked in with his fantasies and started killing in some fantasy of justice. Our National mental illness that we are the unique and supreme power on the planet.
Regarding Cho, the issue that is not being talked about is Mental Illness and how ill equiped we are to diagnose and treat it. Cho was mentally ill. As any parent knows who has had a child with severe mental illness, there is a fantasy that the doctors will know what to do and will tell you how to treat your child. They don't and if they do, it's your health insurance that prescribes the treatment. Some meds and go home. We need to seriously look at how mental illness is being treated in this country. If someone with cancer or a broken limb was treated the way we treat the mentally ill we would all be up in arms. Some investigative reporter should explore how the health insurance influenced his treatment.
Blame the internet, blame guns, blame video games, blame, blame blame. In the long run, some 24 year old insurance company clerck makes the decision: no coverage for hospitilization of the mentally ill. All we do is contain people with cocktails of medication. Mental illness is real and it's not being treated. We spend more energy and resources treating the unhappy people with drugs than we do to treat the people that are truly suffering.