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The Indianapolis shooter had previous FBI contact due to mental health related issues and threats — 40 Comments

1. “Unfortunately, we’re nowhere near having one.”

   Actually, we do have one. I just did a quick internet search and found a publication from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/civil-commitment-continuum-of-care.pdf

   It had these two interesting and revealing facts:

   1. . In 1955, there were more than 550,000 state and county psychiatric beds.

   2. In 2017 and counting state and county beds, private hospitals, general hospitals, VA medical centers, and 24-hour residential treatment centers, there were 170,200 psychiatric beds.

   For perspective, the U.S. population in 1955 was 165.9 million. U.S. population in 2019 was 328.2 million.

   I don’t think there can be any question that if we were civilly committing people with significant mental and emotional problems today like we were in the 1950s, a huge percentage of these mass shooters would be dealt with before they reached murder-stage. And as a bonus, we would also massively reduce the homeless population.

   Of course, there were reasons we stopped locking people up the nuthouse but it kind of sums up the intellectual decadence and degeneration of modern America that we can’t even have a conversation about those reasons in light of the last 50 years of alternative policy.

   Mike

2. MBunge:

   We’ve certainly had conversations about it here. But as you say, that “solution” has its own huge problems. In addition to the huge problems with the restrictions of the liberty of people who have committed no crime, one of the reasons people are now de-institutionalized is that we have better medication now than back then, although medication isn’t a solution either. However, it’s also cheaper than hospitalization, which would be exorbitantly expensive these days if undertaken for any length of time.

3. I was going to put up another of my “F**k the mentally ill” comments, but I have decided not to.

   But the fact is, with them, as with the psychically disturbed feminists described in the Bauerlein essay, “one had to marvel at the lack of self-reflection on our otherwise very sophisticated liberal who was willing to go along with absurdities such as “pussy-hats” and “pee tapes”—a clear sign of psychic turmoil.” we can identify precisely where the disorder resides, yet still cannot muster the will to do anything about it, even on those rare occasions when someone finds the courage to name the problem.

   Our civilization – at least one worth sacrificing for – is disintegrating under the weight of emotionally disturbed fantasists and their puling enablers.

   Now, a libertarian attitude of drawing clear boundaries and letting the crazy do their thing in relative freedom until they splatter their own brains out against the wall, might be a solution, if a hard one. But it would require progressively marginalizing them as they escalate, and the emotional tar-babies who identify as progressives cannot even abide that.

   There used to be churches to deal with some of this kind of “I want to die” shit at one time too. But even those institutions have been colonized by a human-like subspecies of androgynous nesters, and made useless as effective dispensers of meaning and moral guidance. Nice sinecures for masculine females and feminine males though.

   But when it comes to filling their original charters, the inhabitants of these collapsing institutions could not have given that idiot kid a good reason why he should not kill himself or others, if their lives and society depended on it.

   As both of course do.

4. “neo on April 16, 2021 at 8:28 pm said:

   MBunge:

   We’ve certainly had conversations about it here. But as you say, that “solution” has its own huge problems. In addition to the huge problems with the restrictions of the liberty of people who have committed no crime, one of the reasons people are now de-institutionalized is that we have better medication now than back then, although medication isn’t a solution either. However, it’s also cheaper than hospitalization, which would be exorbitantly expensive these days if undertaken for any length of time.”

   Are there no uninhabited islands left anywhere on the globe where they could be encouraged to migrate? Or dumped?

   We are losing our freedoms because we cannot figure out how to deal with people who cannot handle freedom.

   Why? Because “i-n-c-l-u-s-i-o-n”, “c-a-r-i-n-g” … ahh … I cannot even talk about this anymore.

5. It’s a tough one. When you see some of the people allowed to roam free today, the Nut House seems like it ought be brought back.

   Problem is, our Woke Friends would be the ones handling committal and hearings. So there’s that.

   I’d just as soon see Nurse Ratched stuck in her present dead end job in HR. She’s enough trouble right where she is.

6. “Of course, there were reasons we stopped locking people up the nuthouse but it kind of sums up the intellectual decadence and degeneration of modern America that we can’t even have a conversation about those reasons in light of the last 50 years of alternative policy.”

   The Netherlands and Belgium are considering euthanasia for mental illness. To make it even more fun, they are considering harvesting organs for transplant from the euthanized patients.

7. Mike+K on April 16, 2021 at 9:17 pm said:

   “Of course, there were reasons we stopped locking people up the nuthouse but it kind of sums up the intellectual decadence and degeneration of modern America that we can’t even have a conversation about those reasons in light of the last 50 years of alternative policy.”

   The Netherlands and Belgium are considering euthanasia for mental illness. To make it even more fun, they are considering harvesting organs for transplant from the euthanized patients.

   That should not have been unexpected. Yeah, if you abolish “The Snake Pit” in the name of humanity, and your weak-willed and incompetent alternative management program backfires on you, then I suppose the next step a progressive mind is likely to go to is “humane” murder.

   Because better dead than “marginalized”, or something.

8. I’m surprised that the MSM hasn’t yet made a big deal out of the fact that this particular a–Hole is a Person of Pallor, therefore proof of a “white supremacy” movement or some such bugaboo.

9. The Netherlands and Belgium are considering euthanasia for mental illness. To make it even more fun, they are considering harvesting organs for transplant from the euthanized patients.

   Planned Parent/hood is a wicked solution for-profit and convenience.

   On a related note…

   Sixth Circuit Upholds Ohio Law Banning Aborting Babies With Down Syndrome

   Elective abortion of babies to relieve a “burden” is a probable hate crime that discriminates by age and condition.

   Swimmer With Down Syndrome Breaks World Record by Over 6 Seconds Without Realizing

   The mom of an Australian swimming star guesses her daughter Tahnee Afuhaamango has broken over three dozen world records in her career.

10. although medication isn’t a solution either

    No, it is not. Anti-psychotic medications can cause people of a certain young age to rage, which was the proximate cause in several similar incidents in schools and perhaps this event, too.

11. ENOUGH! (Guns, Active Shooters And Pharma)

    There has been a long-standing concern, however, that antidepressants may have a role in inducing worsening of depression and the emergence of suicidality in certain patients during the early phases of treatment. Pooled analyses of short-term placebo-controlled trials of antidepressant drugs (SSRIs and others) showed that these drugs increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children, adolescents, and young adults (ages 18-24) with major depressive disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders. Short-term studies did not show an increase in the risk of suicidality with antidepressants compared to placebo in adults beyond age 24; there was a reduction with antidepressants compared to placebo in adults aged 65 and older.
    – gsk.com

12. I would like to preface my $.02 by saying that DNW does not post nearly enough. The man’s got a point…and talent. Consider me the charter member of the DNW fanclub. Now that my little squeefest is over, on to my tuppence:

    Agree that there is no good solution, but how about we just pull the FBI out of the equation? Yes, yes I know, that’s almost as equally unlikely as defunding that wretched hive, but as long as we’re offering unlikely solutions…

    Given the Feds’ forays into child pornography, aiding and abetting shooters who target the right people, and an apparent inability to do anything to stop the crazies without infringing upon their civil rights, how about we just tell them to use all their new free time to file some other useless reports.

    Or…

    Just tell the Fibbies that the crazies tied a noose in someone’s garage. Or, better yet that they’re running for local office as a Republican. That should light a fire under their asses.

13. From Tombstone:
    Wyatt Earp: What makes a man like Ringo, Doc? What makes him do the things he does?

    Doc Holliday: A man like Ringo has got a great big hole, right in the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.

    Wyatt Earp: What does he need?

    Doc Holliday: Revenge.

    Wyatt Earp: For what?

    Doc Holliday: Bein’ born.

14. Mitchell Strand:

    When I saw the killer’s name, it struck me immediately that growing up with the last name of “Hole” could be a problem. Not for most people, but for anyone who is already psychologically fragile for any reason. I’ve never heard of anyone before with the surname “Hole,” and it struck me as very unusual and kind of creepy.

    You quote also struck me because of this part: “A man like Ringo has got a great big hole, right in the middle of him.”

15. A sampling of recent studies (in Nat. Lib. Med.) shows that socially isolated housing of various social animal species at various stages of life and for various durations results in altered behavior (e.g. anxious, depression-like, aggressive, passive, cognition/memory), physiology (e.g. changes in basal or stress–reactive corticosterone, blood pressure, inflammation, immune responses, hippocampal function) and mortality (e.g. post-stroke outcomes).

    It could be that a lot of our mental dysfunction could be explained by the stress of the pandemic.

16. What goal gives direction to young men’s aspirations? A future working for a thankless elite is not a salve to the suffering of day to day existence.

    The west needs new frontiers to conquer. Until we have that there is no systemic solution.

17. 1. . In 1955, there were more than 550,000 state and county psychiatric beds.

    2. In 2017 and counting state and county beds, private hospitals, general hospitals, VA medical centers, and 24-hour residential treatment centers, there were 170,200 psychiatric beds.

    (1) There are much more cost-effective ways of supervising schizophrenics than 24 hour care; doesn’t take care of all the population with schizophreniform episodes, but takes care of most.

    (2) Tertiary syphilis has disappeared.

    (3) The senile are no longer housed in asylums.

18. When I saw the killer’s name, it struck me immediately that growing up with the last name of “Hole” could be a problem. Not for most people, but for anyone who is already psychologically fragile for any reason. I’ve never heard of anyone before with the surname “Hole,” and it struck me as very unusual and kind of creepy.

    Perhaps a variant spelling of the German name “Holle”.

    Perhaps more salient would be nature’s endowment conjoined to his grooming. You’ve seen the pix, no?

19. The first question that always pops into my head with these events is SSRI-related. We know a *lot* of young people take them now and that this trend started 25 years ago or more, we know they can cause not just suicidal thoughts but also violent thoughts in young men (depending, I presume, on their predisposition toward violence), we know that despite this medication epidemic a lot of young men are still fighting depression and anxiety due to “failure to launch” issues, college debt, and a host of other obstacles, and we know that the media is loathe to report anything anti-Big Pharma.

    It’s very possible that the actual solution to this mysterious trend is lying in plain sight — but nobody in a position to inform the publicly honestly about it, or take useful action, will do so.

    I don’t have the “want to” to dig into 5 or 10 articles about this story in order to learn more about a possible SSRI connection, but maybe someone who does will fill us in.

20. a lot of young men are still fighting depression and anxiety due to “failure to launch” issues, college debt, and a host of other obstacles, and we know that the media is loathe to report anything anti-Big Pharma.

    Dissatisfaction with life is quite normal, thus are dissatisfactions which are signatures of different points in the life cycle. A conscientious society teaches tactics and strategies to power-through those dissatisfactions. A stupid society lionizes Sylvia Plath.

    The hypertrophy of tertiary schooling, the rot of secondary schooling, and ill-considered modes of financing tertiary schooling are an own-goal we could do something about were we an intelligent society. Because we are a stupid society, nothing will be done because faculty, administration, and teacher’s unions are all Democratic interest groups.

    Other sources of dissatisfaction are cultural and insensitive to public policy. One would be the incapacity of one cohort after another (in comparison to people born prior to 1938) to build durable and virtuous affiliations. A great deal of that is a slatterny-to-grotesque social ethic in re human sexuality, a force which belongs in channels, not all over the landscape.

    IMO, psychiatrists (and some internists) prescribe psychotropics because they have a salutary effect (superficial or no) and are the only ready way to manage certain types of people, like schizophrenics. The alternative is the talking cure.

    The talking cure has one reliable outcome: the therapist gets paid. There are honest and conscientious practitioners. Still, the transaction between the ‘patient’ and the purveyor of the talking cure is one vulnerable to corruption, bad attitudes, gaslighting, and promotion of rancid social ideologies. Paul McHugh, who was chief of psychiatry back in the day, has discussed the structural deficiences of psychiatry which set it apart from other medical subdisciplines and render it comparatively primitive (I assume Michael K would have some critical engagement with that). For those of us who are laymen, psychiatry and clinical psychology seem vulnerable to waves of quackery (e.g. psychoanalysis, psychosurgery, the whole child-sexual-abuse discourse).

    We should keep in mind the possibility that excess prescription of psychotropics is another wave of quackery. It’s not as if doctors in other subdisciplines do not overprescribe (something for which patients bear some responsibility to be sure).

21. I kept banging my head as to where I’d seen the name before. The first wife of Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts. Her maiden name was Dorothy Hoelle.

22. The possible involvement of SSRI medications is worth looking at. Also, this kid followed a weird online group focused, evidently, on My Little Pony. He worked for FedEx for two months last year, ending in October. I wonder if he’s been doing anything at all since then. Has Indiana been locked down much? The combined effects of restrictions, possible medications, and toxic social media are overwhelming a lot of people.

    True to form, Biden is demanding “background checks” before information about how this killer got the gun is available.

23. Art Deco: “We should keep in mind the possibility that excess prescription of psychotropics is another wave of quackery.”

    I’ve already adopted that as my default assumption. The vast majority of those over-prescribed folks, I also assume, would have been much better off reading (and adopting the advice of) a book such as “The Road Less Traveled”.

    You can’t expect your life to change if you don’t change your life, etc. So many people build mental and emotional prisons for themselves with attitude and the way they react to events — medication helps some people, a bit, but when the way you live your life is the main obstacle to your happiness and success, the best (and often the only) way to address that long-term is to retrain your brain.

24. Anti-psychotic medications can cause people of a certain young age to rage, which was the proximate cause in several similar incidents in schools and perhaps this event, too.

    I would like to see a reference with data on such cases. I know of none.

    The whole hospitalization issue was begun by two works of fiction, “The Snakepit” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” I spent a summer in 1962 as a first year medical student working in a VA psychiatric hospital. I have a chapter in my memoir, “War Stories: 50 Years in Medicine,” if anyone is interested in a long version. The short version is that, even with the primitive anti-psychotics of the day, most schizophrenics could be managed in an out patient setting but the hospital had to be in the background, not as punishment but as reassurance that we still knew the patient was crazy and the hospital was there if the world got too frightening. Closing all the hospitals removed the option and the result is what we see on the street.

    Of course, the great increase the past decade is mostly due to addicts. I used to take my medical students on a tour of the homeless shelters in LA every year. The Directors told us that 60% of homeless were psychotic, 60% were addicts and half of each group was both. The addict share has probably doubled or more. Also the myth of children homeless was just that, a myth. The Social Service agencies got children and mothers into safe shelters in hours.

25. The vast majority of those over-prescribed folks, I also assume, would have been much better off reading (and adopting the advice of) a book such as “The Road Less Traveled”.

    If you say so. My impression of Scott Peck was that the guy was a tool. Psychiatrists of a certain vintage who talked to the public (Peck, Rollo May) seemed ever to be promoting vague and ever-receding goals. (Peck’s was ‘spiritual growth’ or some such).

    I’m a layman and don’t know much. My gut has told me for some time that Thomas Szasz qualified by Fuller Torrey and Paul McHugh (or should it be the other way around?) might be an approximation of the truth. There are people who are a maddening problem for their families and for the public at large. Psychiatrists are an auxilliary corps to the main body of those employed to maintain order in this world, an auxilliary passably equipped to supervise a particular subpopulation. What Torrey had to say about the mental health trade and the general public seems apt: the vast majority of people under its supervision are the ‘worried well’; they benefit from counseling, not therapy, and counseling is a department of education, not medicine.

    IMO, clinical psychologists and the counselors are purveyors of a fee-for-service activity of dubious utility, services which should not be financed by insurance companies or public agencies. And, please, train them in schools of professional psychology, not in social work programs or teacher training programs (or academic psychology departments, while we’re at it). You want to talk to these people, that’s fine. It’s out of your pocket, or it’s via your employer’s (wholly optional) EAP program, or it’s financed by a benevolent society.

    Disclosure: we in our household have had five proximate relations enmeshed in the mental health trade and several who’ve been social workers (one is an LCSW). I’ve only been on bad terms with one of these people (who is now deceased) and only dislike one of the remainder. Some things you don’t discuss at dinner.

26. His mother comes up in reports of his run-in with the FBI a year ago, but there’s no mention of a father. Although I won’t claim that 100% of young men who go postal come from fatherless households, the correlation is strong.

27. Mental illness is on a continuum. From numismatics (imo) to violent psychopathy. At some point, Authority determines an individual has to be involuntarily committed and not just restrained, but have his head messed with.
    This requires at least the protections afforded the accused criminal.
    Hell, it could be as simple as the logical–one step extension–of the Red Flag laws when the local Authority is needing some quarterly numbers.
    I kid about numismatics, sort of, but it stops being funny when somebody bankrupts his family in the pursuit thereof. Where, on the continuum?

    It was said some time ago that today a kid can destroy a million invaders from the planet Mongo….and get no credit. But, a hundred years earlier, shoveling out the stable got him credit and gratitude from the adults who explained how that allowed them to do some other things the family needed.

    Long ago, as usher and Session member, I noted a kid of about seven in the church whose family situation was not good. Every chance I got, I put him to work doing something useful around the place on Sunday mornings. I once looked into the fellowship room after service and pointed at him, from about forty feet. He gave an exaggerated shrug that his skills were being called upon yet again and left the grownups to help me arrange some chairs for the elderly. I always made a point of telling him about the connection with helping those who needed it, one way or another.

    An el ed teacher and counselor said that was the best thing happening to him all week, which is a shame, but it fits in how to raise a kid.

    Last I heard, he turned out okay. Wonder if I had something to do with it. Point is, I was giving him useful work. Wonder if there’s a lesson there.

28. Art+Deco wrote, “I’ve only been on bad terms with one of these people (who is now deceased) ….”

    Note to self: ….

    😉

29. Mental illness is on a continuum. From numismatics (imo) to violent psychopathy. At some point,

    I agree with this. The UCLA professor I worked for back in 1962 treated only psychotics in his private practice. He said neurotics are just normal people with problems. One of his residents at UCLA wrote a book that was very popular and is still in print. It was titled, “Reality Therapy,” and was recommended for the LA school system back when schools in LA were sane.

30. Interesting Kate. So Mr. Hole was perhaps a brony? (See paragraph #2)

    … and alleged misogyny by bronies.

    Very strange.

31. Yes, TommyJay, a brony. His Facebook page was taken down at police request. The WSJ reports:

    A post timestamped 10:19 p.m., less than an hour before the shooting, featured an image of the cartoon pony named Applejack. “I hope that I can be with Applejack in the afterlife, my life has no meaning without her,” the post said. “If there’s no afterlife and she isn’t real then my life never mattered anyway.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/multiple-people-shot-at-fedex-facility-in-indianapolis-11618551906?mod=hp_lead_pos6

32. For those of you who do not have young children, there was a change shortly after the Affordable Care Act was passed when we noticed our children’s Pediatricians asking for time alone with our children when they had a doctor’s visit. My wife and I thought nothing of it, but, naturally, on the drive home our kids would tell us what the Doctors were asking. One of the questions is; “have you ever had thoughts of suicide or self harm?”

    I don’t want to get into details, but I know many families where things quickly spiraled into a long journey of battling hospital staff to get their children back depending on how their kids have answered that question.

33. I don’t want to get into details, but I know many families where things quickly spiraled into a long journey of battling hospital staff to get their children back depending on how their kids have answered that question.

    It’s not just kids. My brother-in-law is a retired Chicago cop with bladder cancer. He had a stroke about 20 years ago that disabled him. He was in the hospital for a chemo treatment and some nurse asked that question of him. He answered, “Yeah, I have thought of it.” Instantly he was in custody of psych techs and went to the looney bin floor. My sister had a hell of a time getting him out. More than one day.

34. “But as you say, that “solution” has its own huge problems. In addition to the huge problems with the restrictions of the liberty of people who have committed no crime,”

    The last job my mother, who passed away in 1985, had was working for the State of Michigan at one of the mental institutions. Each person committed there had to have a hearing each year before a judge to determine if they should remain institutionalized. The State had to provide for a lawyer to argue the case for releasing them. My mother’s job was to prepare the case for keeping them in the institution. I don’t know if those yearly hearings are still the case but it seemed a reasonable way to have some protection of the rights of those institutionalized.

35. geoff b:

    Byt 1985, the bulk of de-institutionalization had already happened, as far as I know.

36. Texan99:

    The correlation is actually not strong at all. It’s unsupported. I wrote a post on that a while back. You can find it here.

37. She worked at this from the early 70s to 1983 after she got her 2nd Masters. She taught Jr. high English and history during most of my life after I was considered old enough to be at home alone, 8 or so, caring for my younger brother after school until she got home, dad worked 2nd shift and was gone before we got out of school.

    The institution was mainly for those whose mental age was below 12 and most were mentally very young children. I was mainly commenting on how, at least then, the rights of those that had been involuntarily institutionalized were handled. A yearly hearing with counsel in front of a judge.

38. Mike+K wrote above, “My brother-in-law is a retired Chicago cop … He answered, ‘Yeah, I have thought of it.’ … and went to the looney bin floor.”
    (Sigh.)
    A Chicago cop, disabled by a stroke, getting chemo for cancer. His answer IS sanity.

    .

    And, speaking of the funny farm … Poof. You wake up, and you’re surrounded by crazy people. (Yourself included, but that’s another joke.) How can you tell if it’s a mental hospital or a meditation retreat? At a retreat, the fire exits generally aren’t labeled “elopement risk.”
    You’re welcome.

39. Is Rosenhan still a thing?

40. Neo, thanks, looks like I was popping off about a correlation I’d noticed but never tried to investigate rigorously.

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