Mental Health Community resists reporting. :: 07/11/2013

We know of only one member of Congress, Rep. Tim Murphy, who is vehemently opposed to the attitude shown by the mental health community. He's had town hall meetings all over his district, seeking input on the correlationbetween Violence and Mental Illness. This article shows what he, a mental health care professional himself, is up against. In short, the liberal mindset in mental health is more apt to blame the gun than the violently mentally ill.

Policy & Issues newsletter The Obama administration is running into resistance in its effort to expand a background check database from a surprising quarter - the mental health community - because of patient privacy concerns, Reuters reported yesterday. This puts Barack Obama on the other side of a controversy from a voting bloc - the medical profession - which otherwise largely supports the president's gun control agenda. However, it now appears that the wrong ox is being gored by Obama's executive action to put the identities of more mental patients into the NICS system to make sure they cannot legally purchase firearms.

According to Reuters, the Department of Health and Human Services was deluged with more than 2,000 letters and comments from people when it asked for public comment on proposed changes to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to loosen patient privacy so the government could get access to the records of patients who might be disqualified from buying a gun. "Health care professionals are sympathetic to Obama's goal of reducing gun violence," Reuters reported, "but worry that the privacy rule proposal could discourage people with mental illness from seeking treatment." The story quoted Daniel Fisher, a Massachusetts psychiatrist and mental health advocate who was treated for schizophrenia many years ago. He told the news agency, "I think it's a bad idea. It would really put a chill on people getting services...They find it very scary, the idea of a national database that the government will keep." Many in the firearms community would tell Dr. Fisher, "Welcome to the party, pal." These are the same concerns gun owners have had for years about their own privacy, and about sharing information with family doctors who ask them about firearms in their homes. Perhaps now, Fisher and his colleagues will understand why lawmakers in Florida moved to stop that kind of prying legislatively a couple of years ago, though expecting them to make the connection might be wishful thinking. Incredibly, the Reuters report lays out the medical community's laments in a manner that leaves the firearms community pointing "We-told-you-so" fingers. "The idea of expanding the database comes at a time when the government's collection of citizens' phone and internet data is in the headlines, after a former CIA contractor revealed top secret information about surveillance programs," Reuters noted. "Mental health advocates worry that somehow, whether intentionally by a hacker or unintentionally through bureaucratic bungling, mental health data in the background check system could be made public," the story said. Reuters quoted James Jackson, executive director of Disability Rights New Mexico, "I don't think of myself as at all paranoid about this, but I do think that a lot of people worry that information may not be as secure as we all want to be reassured that it is." "Advocates also argue that the inclusion of mental health data in a criminal database is unfair," Reuters noted. "Having the data included in the database infers that people with mental illnesses are dangerous and violent, even though the vast majority are not." Many gun rights advocates will throw that right back at Jackson, arguing that law-abiding citizens should not need permission from the government before exercising a constitutionally-protected fundamental civil right. A background check, they say, smacks of prior restraint, a term that causes First Amendment advocates and virtually every journalist on the map to bristle, same as learning of an IRS probe. "The constant chronic coupling of gun violence with mental illness is just devastating," Marilyn Martin, policy analyst with Access Living in Chicago, told Reuters. In response to Martin, the "constant media coupling of the words "gun" and "violence" when there is no effort to categorize "knife violence" or "baseball bat violence" or "bare knuckle violence" is no less offensive to gun owners who have harmed nobody. Perhaps a quote from Patrick Corrigan, professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, best explained the privacy issue. He told Reuters that the thought of having health information shared with the government upsets people "who fear they could lose their jobs or their relationships." "It's going to muddy the relationships that health care providers have with their patients, and dissuade patients even more from going into care," Corrigan said. That's the fear of many in the military who may avoid seeking help out of fear they will lose their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, a right they defended with their lives in some foreign land. Rights advocates might have a bit of hope that now the medical community will finally understand gun owner concerns about privacy and loss of rights to an increasingly intrusive Obama administration's efforts to dig as deeply into their personal affairs as possible, while cloaking itself in secrecy.