We find this all too often. Law enforcement doesn’t know, and sadly, doesn’t always care that they’re dealing with an EDP (emotionally distressed person), with a mental illness. We work with local law enforcement, here in Northern Jersey, to bridge that gap by training them on Mental Health First Aid, but it’s been a slow process. When placed in juxtaposition, the dichotomy between how we mental health professionals and law enforcement deal with EDP, is still glaring. It’s a work in progress. What i would like to see, is the Mental Health First Aid curriculum put into police academies, nationwide. This way we can get to future police in their pupa stage. That would solve that problem. How we deal with existing law enforcement, is another issue altogether.
I work at Georgia Tech and the administration’s response has been absolutely abysmal. The email that the president of the Institute sent out on Sunday stated, “Late last night, we lost one of our students”–as if Georgia Tech had a passive role in the incident. He went on to say, “it is important to know that all of us here at Georgia Tech are committed to providing a safe and healthy, living and learning environment for all of our students, faculty and staff.” How hollow that sounds. Students are also venting their frustrations about the poor access to mental health resources on campus–long wait times for counseling, limited numbers of allowed appointments, etc.
Furthermore, the Institute has yet to send out any kind of statement as of 10am regarding the events of last night. The only communication I have received from the Institute were the safety alerts from last night urging us to take shelter and then later that “At this time the campus has been cleared of any threats.” Ha.
Too bad they don’t allow concealed carry on campus, that would have made things much more in control. It’s just astounding that some folks think the previous sentence is true.
Fun fact: We do have campus carry as of July 1st. Thanks Georgia state legislature!.. (<—sarcasm)
Of course, there is no way to know to what extent this contributed to the circumstances, but the campus police do now need to contend with the possibility that anyone on campus may be legally carrying a concealed weapon. This incident is almost certainly the worst nightmare of the administration and university police departments who, in fact, strongly opposed the legislation.
They didn’t call the wild west wild because no one had guns to defend themselves