slipped through the cracks

Is it pos­si­ble that the Gun­man in the Col­orado Mas­sacre was not prop­er­ly treat­ed for a seri­ous men­tal ill­ness?

In a news sto­ry out of Fox News Com­pa­ny the med­ical record of this doc­tor could be sus­pect in some seri­ous ways.

WAS Psy­chi­a­trist Lynne Fen­ton treat­ing Col­orado movie mas­sacre sus­pect James Holmes.
Did she make a mis­take?  Should she have hos­pi­tal­ized him?  The answer now is obvi­ous­ly yes and yes and yes.

But was this a pre­ventable sit­u­a­tion, I think the answer has to be yes, though it is so easy to say it from this view­point you have to think that if this patient had been treat­ed by a more pro­fes­sion­al and per­haps even “Board Cer­ti­fied” doc­tor the end result may have been very dif­fer­ent, of course this does not excuse any human being from the per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty of exer­cis­ing good judge­ment and seek­ing help before some­thing like this becomes a prob­lem.

Over all the answers may nev­er be known one thing for sure as long as we have mar­gin­al doc­tors that should not be prac­tic­ing med­i­cine for crit­i­cal patients, we will face the pos­si­bil­i­ty of hav­ing these prob­lems over and over again.

The thing to do now is to find out how to iden­ti­fy these high risk patients and take the appro­pri­ate action to pre­vent these hor­ri­ble out­comes.

 Read­ing about the poten­tial for the treat­ing physi­cian may have dropped the ball is con­ve­nient but is it accu­rate we real­ly do not know the full extent of this sit­u­a­tion it might be that she did try to help him but he did not come to his appoint­ments on a reg­u­lar basis, of course its so easy to sit back on the couch and judge the results still it makes you won­der if the man had sought more qual­i­fied and pro­fes­sion­al help would we even be read­ing this sto­ry today?

We real­ly do need to begin to bet­ter ass­es the risk involved in human behav­ior, con­sid­er­ing this took place over a peri­od of sev­er­al months, there were like­ly many signs that some­thing was wrong, from the pur­chase of ammu­ni­tion to guns, to all kinds of dif­fer­ent things in-between, you would think that some­one along the line would have tak­en the steps of report­ing this to the police so it could be inves­ti­gat­ed.

If it turned out to be noth­ing you did what you could do, but in this case it turned out to be a seri­ous prob­lem that no one took action on, from the shoot­ing club, to gun deal­ers, to doc­tors, no one did the right thing, how could that hap­pen?

Once we learn how to iden­ti­fy how to stop these sit­u­a­tions from occur­ring and how to man­age our actions bet­ter we might find that sav­ing lives becomes a lot eas­i­er.

Until that time we may find that the answers are still wait­ing to be found, how­ev­er it appears that at least sev­er­al oppor­tu­ni­ties were lost to pre­vent this crime and that is some­thing that will haunt the dreams of those involved for many years to come.