Monday, April 23, 2007

Art Caplan: Fix the Mental-Health Crisis

Wise, and passionate, words from well-known Penn ethicist Art Caplan. Here's a snippet, but read on in this powerful commentary.

It is not just guns. In all my life I never thought I would write those words after a massacre involving a mass murder with a gun. But a week’s worth of intense media coverage of the heinous murders of students and faculty at Virginia Tech and analyses focusing on guns by innumerable experts has left me furious.

I don’t think the expert wisdom is even close to understanding what must be done to try and prevent this type of tragedy in the future. It is not just guns. We need to fix a broken, abandoned and pathetic system of mental-health care.