Happy New Year, Bang, Bang

It's a new year.  I hope you are all healthy and happy, and that you and all those you love are safe and warm.

I am old and cynical, so take this for what it's worth, but 2015 does not hold much promise for being much better than 2014, except maybe for the Patriots -- that's the football team, not a bunch of Whooped-Up Americans.

For most people 2014 was kind of OK.  If you were rich you got richer.  Everyone else paid a little more and got paid a little less, but for most folks it wasn't too drastic.  If you were poor and struggling last year it looks like you will be poor and struggling this year. If you had psychological and emotional issues last year more of you will be able to get some kind of help, from some kind of somewhat trained helper.  They may give you a supportive place to list your difficulties.  They may offer some advice, the kind of which you knew before you saw them.  They may even help you see that you have some paths to choose that you didn't realize were open to you.  That can be very helpful.

But they won't be able to open any doors that are closed to you, or spend enough time with you so that you can retrain your brain to not be so reactive, or to learn totally new behavioral responses to stressful situations, or to change the stressful situation, or to change the fact that you may have chronic pain or a degenerative disease.

In short, there is still no really effective treatment for all the things we call "mental illness."

The guy who shot the two policeman in NYC, the kid who shot his adoptive mother and a couple of other people in Idaho, the veteran who shot his psychologist in Texas, and of course, the jihadists who killed so many people in Paris were all suffering from some form of discontentment.  I believe that  at sometime in their lives they had either actively sought help, or were at least known in their communities to be people who were "at risk."

Do we know what to do to help people who are "at risk?"  I think that most of the time we could figure out an answer.  Find a way to form a relationship, to not only offer help but to offer some resources so that they are able to use the help -- a place to live, job training, stable support people, food, warmth, trust, encouragement, understanding, new and better options to choose from.

But that is very time consuming and very expensive.  It's much simpler, easier, and cheaper just to wait until they go off the rails, and then shoot them.

there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.
-- H.L. Mencken.