“The United States stands alone with the frequency of school and mass shootings… mental health plays a role, but so does easy access to a large variety of guns.”
— Delaware Academy of Medicine.
By Jack Bernard, contributing columnist
PEACHTREE CITY, Ga. | Mental health is only one factor in school shootings. If the United States had implemented gun control, there would be virtually no school shootings. Nevertheless, mental health is an important aspect that must be addressed.
One of my activities is to chair a social action group, Fayette Factor, that is part of Family Connection (a statewide 501-C-3 not-for-profit). Factor provides a multitude of mental health and substance abuse services and brings together many such agencies to work collaboratively. Back in the 70s and 80s, I served as the state of Georgia’s first Director of Health Planning. My units developed both physical and mental comprehensive health plans for Georgia.
As part of its mission, Factor asked the regional McIntosh Trails Community Service Board to present mental health to our schools, a particularly hot topic in light of the recent Winder school shooting. Community Service Boards (CSBs) are public entities created by the Georgia legislature in 1993 to provide mental health, developmental disability and addictive disease services.
There are a multitude of these CSBs though-out the state of Georgia. They provide services to individuals experiencing symptoms associated with mental illness, addictive disease and/or developmental disability.
The presentation was invigorating. Of particular importance was the role of the family and the school in identifying problems before they explode. Along these lines, the speakers talked about getting children with problems to seek help.
I grew up in an Italian and Irish working-class area on the border of New York City. Most parents were first generation, hardworking construction workers, carpenters, mechanics and low-level government employees. Children were brought up to be clannish. The Irish did not fully trust the Italians and vice-versa. And if you were neither, “fa-ged-aboud-it.”
Among us was a rotten kid that had been left back twice in school. He was always getting in trouble and was mean as a snake. Plus, he was older and bigger than the rest of us.
One day, he secretly brought his father’s pistol. Six of us were walking to school when he took the pistol out of his lunch bag. Because we were scared, we told him what he wanted to hear. That he was really cool.
None of us thought about reporting him to the school. There definitely was the fear factor. But we were also afraid of being ostracized as “snitches.”
The kid didn’t shoot anyone. But he was violent and could have. A year later, he knocked out my brother’s front teeth with a round from a slingshot. He never went to counseling afterwards, claiming shooting him in the face was an accident.
Today the social workers and psychologists indicated that failure to identify violence-prone children remains a problem today. A child cannot receive help unless he is somehow identified.
Now, there are anonymous hotlines. The question remains whether other children seeing problems will use them. Surely, a classmate or two must have been aware of the deep mental problems that the Apalachee shooter had…and failed to report him.
We must train our children to do better in recognizing the need to report when they see other students having troubling problems.
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