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Focus on mental health issues, not more force

I disagree with a recent editorial which implied that perhaps the best plan of action to prevent any further school shootings is to give teachers more training to spot children who are on the verge of exploding.

I believe a better plan would be to focus on the medical/mental health industries efforts to use children as their proverbial test subjects when it comes to experimenting with medications for “mental illnesses” that in many cases I am not convinced even exist.

Furthermore, behind every school shooting of the past 30 years has been a troubled youth who was being treated by a “mental health professional” who put them on medications to “help control” a variety of various emotional. In each case these children were on medications that even their doctors were not sure what the side effects/consequences would be.

I’m no mental health expert-but when the end result of this plan of action is an ever mounting body count-perhaps we need to back up, reevaluate our options and seek out some new solutions.

Fifty years ago, the entire mental health industry was convinced we all had ADD. Then they switched to manic depression or bi-polar disorder. Now Asperger’s Disorder is the mental illness of the moment. Also, every couple of years there’s a new miracle anti-depressant” on the market-like Paxil. Then before you know it-we discover that the side effects include suicidal thoughts and tendencies?

Instead of forcing teachers to have expensive training that is only going to make their already overly demanding jobs harder-I think more parents should find an alternative to raising their children that does not include turning them into little zombie time bombs.

Truth is truth-school-based shootings did not exist in our culture until people started playing with the delicate chemistry of children’s minds.

Tracey Clark

Pomeroy

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