John Oliver, the host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, criticized GOP presidential nominees for discussing mental health instead of gun control. He viewed their discussion about mental health as a way to change the subject and remove the focus from the main issue. Thursday’s incident of the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon left the nation speechless and shocked at the growing frequency of shootings occurring all over the US.
President Obama addressed the nation, saying it was their fault for not putting enough pressure on their state’s senators for stricter gun control laws. “We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction.”
With the president pushing for gun control, the 2016 GOP nominees decided to highlight the issue of mental health as the primary cause for the shootings. Here are some quotes by the presidential hopefuls:
“This isn’t guns; this is really about mental illness.” —Donald Trump.
“Do we need to do a better job in mental health? You bet we do.” —Mike Huckabee.
“In many of these shootings, people have mental disturbances.” —Ben Carson.
On Saturday, Oliver was quick to point out the gaffes that the Republican nominees made when they released comments about mental health as the reason behind the mass shooting. Oliver, who uses witty satire in his monologues, didn’t appreciate that the GOP nominees tried to place blame on the mentall
y ill.
Oliver said, “Perhaps the clearest sign of just how little we want to talk about mental health is that one of the only times it’s actively brought up is, as we’ve seen yet again this week, is in the aftermath of a mass shooting.”
He also talked about how Governor Huckabee’s state of Arkansas earned a “D-” grade on mental health while he was governor. Oliver went on to say, Huckabee has no right to lecture someone on mental health when his own state didn’t do so well.
To back up his argument of how mental health should not be considered as the cause for shootings, he showed his viewers research conducted by the American Journal of Public Health in 2015. The research stated that individuals diagnosed with a mental illness commit less than 5% of the 120,000 shootings. According to Annals of Epidemiology, a large percentage of people diagnosed with a mental illness are nonviolent.
The host acknowledged that the United States does have a grave mental health problem. In 2013, doctors diagnosed 43.8 million Americans with a mental disorder, and each year, doctors diagnose at least 10 million Americans with a mental disorder. The country’s track record of handing mental disorders has not been great.
President Kennedy passed a bill closing down unsuccessful mental asylums, replacing them with community health centers in the 1960s. Without proper funding, the centers didn’t last or weren’t maintained. This resulted in people going elsewhere for therapy and the places they went to were shocking. In 2009, AP uncovered that 125, 000 middle-aged and young patients were relocated to nursing homes.
Since some states lacked funding, they participated in the “Greyhound Therapy” program where they discharged mental health patients early because they didn’t have space for them. To add to his argument, he gave statistics regarding the number of mental health patients that commit crimes.
He noted that 2 million patients diagnosed with a mental illness are sent to jail each year. This signifies that ten times more mental health patients are in jail when they should be in a psychiatric institute receiving treatments.
He concluded his argument saying if the GOP nominees really want to shift the focus from gun control to mental illness than they should also come up with a plan to make more space available for the mentally ill to receive care and treatment.
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