His mother is the only one calling him mentally ill or psychotic and that's not much to rely on. The police are calling him a criminal with a long history of crimes especially around drugs. His best friend said he was depressed by a break up and injury and by using street drugs. He was supposed to have a mental health evaluation upon his release but he had to pay for it himself and did not have the money and his probation officers were still trying to find money for it when he shot all these folks. Without any mental health evaluation it is hard to see where one can say he was "deranged" nor psychotic and if his motber really wanted him committed why didn't she pay for the mental health evaluation or even seek treatment for him because there is no evidence that she did either of those things? The New York Times has a decent story on the case up tonight.

Why add to TAC's propaganda campaign when the facts indicate this was drug related and not to do with serious mental illness?

Philip, the hyperlink to Liz's article is dead.

This story is sad, plain and simple. My heart goes out to all involved.

i fixed the link. alison, it may turn out to be drug related or a mix of mental illness and drug use, although he did pass a recent UA test. we'll know at some point. in reality, the police, the DOC, his mom, neighbors and so on all id'd him as being mentally ill, so i simply have no problem using the term. accusing me of playing into tac's agenda is a bit unfair, given my history of ripping apart their false arguments and data twisting. and you'll see more of that tomorrow.

i hadn't heard that he had to pay for his own evaluation and find that a bit odd since DOC and just about anyone in the system out here knows that you can get a psych eval at a hospital, so i'm not sure what was going on here. it's not too complicated for someone in the system to pick up the phone and get a county designated mental health professional (as they are officially known) out to do a psych eval. we did it at the homeless sheltered where i once worked all the time.

this article in the seattle times (co-authored by a friend of mine who's covered mental health issues a lot) makes it clear the guy was mentally ill, had been variously dx'd as having bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, and so on.

The diagnosis combined with the meds are what cause the violence in these situations imho. If this were not the case why would the drastic increase in diagnosis and medication be so positively correlated with an increase in these sorts of violent crimes?

If the only treatments for mental distress are force, humiliation, torture, imprisonment, and drugs so horrible even a drug addict recoils from them, should we be surprised when people don't want that treatment. Fuller Torrey describes the mentally ill as subhuman beasts. As Shakespeare wrote: "Thou callest me a dog when I had no fangs. Beware my fangs."

Society is inadvertently creating these people, causing these deaths, by refusing to accept our own data regarding the futility of punitive psychiatry.

"busted with cocaine" but he is FIRST a mental patient?

I'm not sure where I read it, but one article mentioned he had recently been kicked out of his home & had said he was going to get even. If so, there's your motive - he may be mentally ill but if a person is able to plot out violence in retaliation for being kicked out of their home then they belong in the prison system not a hospital.

He could be mentally ill and a drug abuser and a person with a long criminal history and someone who was angry at others/held grudges, all of these things at once. Choosing "mentally ill" as "the" relevant factor in his committing this horrible crime is the problem I have with the coverage. We know that substance abuse is highly correlated with violence as is male gender and youth, we do not have the same evidence in regards to mental illness, quite the reverse in fact, so the relevant facts about this man and this crime are that he abused drugs, had a history of criminal behavior and was male and young and somehow had access to a gun, not that he may or may not have had a mental illness. The info about paying for his own MH evaluation is in the New York Times piece by the way.

You do go after TAC and I appreciate that Philip but when something like this happens and any of us decide that mental illness is the relevant characteristic about the perpetrator we are falling into their way of framing things, intentionally or not.

People with diabetes who don't take care of it statistically have more car accidents than the rest of the population but you won't usually see that mentioned in stories about car accidents. There would be an outcry if you did.

I hate musings about someone in the news who "had mental illness" in these stories. They are shredded and their history is wide open for scrutiny.

It DOES take days if not weeks to get a psych eval by an MHP and it will only happen for commitment at an ER.

My daughter who was not a gun toting person with a criminal past got committed, it took 12 hours and a crabby MHP complaining there are only 28 of them working finally showed up.

This system is not streamlined in WA. and what the mother says? I doubt she would portray her son as mentally ill w/out reason, why place that on the news if he wasn't? maybe that's just me.

I cringe at these stories, and count on ppl like Maureen to write about them with care, because if this was my daughter I'd want a gag order on everyone including her files. EVERY thing is held against you in this state and your paper trail will and can lead you straight to the wards of Western State Hospital if you have any record of mental illness.

This guy snapped, and you know what? would we be talking about it if he had no mental illness history?

Leave him alone and leave their family alone.

i forgot to add to my rant above, thanks to Philip for handling this story well, and i refer to maureen who is taking on in mainstream and local print media. the guy doesn't need to be judged via mental illness; he killed people and that's a crime with concrete facts. taking on why his past just bothers me. but maybe i'm in the system so long i've got a lot of stuff that bothers me. the system in this state is crap for care!!!

With regards to Stephany's query regarding whether we would be talking about mental illness if he had no mental illness history, I fear that the whole fear of the "mentally ill" hysteria has gotten so far out of hand that when one of these tragedies, so common in the biopsych era, virtually non existant before, occurs, even if the guy had no history of "mental illness," the media would say he was among the undiagnosed mentally ill and make all of the same arguments.

He was homeless, unemployed and a cocaine addict. Homelessness, unemployment and cocaine addiction, not to mention gun violence associated with cocaine use are real social problems. Wonder how the rate of gun violence among those using cocaine compares with the rate of gun violence among those labeled as schizophrenic. I bet the cocaine folks top out much higher. Why not life in "drug treatment centers" for everyone who has ever used cocaine just in case? I wonder how George Bush, Julian Bond, even our beloved Obama would feel about that? I'm not in favor of such a draconian plan but it's along the same lines.

The fact that the media blames this all on an imaginary social problem (the violent mentally ill) and recommends taking away civil rights as the solution is in itself scary as hell.

good points alison. i didn't see that nyt story and i'm not sure what to make of it since that line hasn't popped up in the local press which is much closer to the story than the times is.

i had a long conversation with someone this morning who is close to this whole sad story. what i can tell you is that the guy had a shifting diagnostic history (sz and bp) but where he ended up sounds like sz to me. delusions, hearing voices, paranoia, convinced he owned other peoples' houses. etc.

it's not clear what the guy's drug use was like this summer but he had recently passed a UA last month, which would've caught any pot within 30 days or so. cocaine use clears quicker. he had been busted for coke in the past, so it is possible that he could've been using around the time this whole tragedy went down, but i tend to think not since he was living in the woods and had no money.

either way, sz and cocaine are a terrible mix.

I just got off of the telephone with a person at the Seattle PI.

I asked these questions:

1. Do you know if he was on medication?

I think the mother said he wasn't"

2. Do you always report print news using hearsay?
No.

3.Do you know if he was on meds?
No.

4. Do you know who owned the gun?
No.

Before that, I read the riot act about using Fuller Torrey who believes in forced medication which is less than efficacious, I told them they were stigmatizing, and as a mental health advocate I found their article to be full of errors, and recommended to them that they get the facts before they report and hype "with apparent mental illness who didn't get treatment in time to prevent violence."

I ended the call with "Do your job", when he answered no to some of what I believe are the most important questions that need to be answered before a print media paper writes such an inflamatory stigma-producing piece.