The last week has seen emotions from all over the spectrum since a troubled young man walked into a school and did the unthinkable. At least the unthinkable for anyone who is a sentient human being. In those emotions have come the sort of recriminations and blame that one would expect from such an event.

There has also been a great deal of politicized grand standing of the sort that solves nothing but drives fund raising on all sides of the political spectrum. If you think for a moment that there are not emails and letters designed to push agendas and check books being readied even at this moment, then you are mistaken.

Groups, candidates, Political Actions Committees are all pushing agendas in the aftermath of the school shooting in Florida. Politicians of every background, local, regional, national, are staking their claim to positions on this shooting and what is to blame. Most of them blame the inanimate object in this episode, the firearm as though the causation is singular. Why is this?

After the attacks on 9/11 the nation did not blame the attack on the airplanes. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing the nation did not blame the truck company whose truck carried the bomb. In those incidents blame for the actions was laid at the feet of those who committed the acts. It was what was in their dark hearts, what was in their souls which was to blame. Not an item or an object.

As is often the case in school shootings, there were tell-tale moments that went untold. This individual in Florida was apparently well known to the local police. It has been reported by numerous news outlets that there were more than three dozen requests for service to his mother’s home in the past several years. Add to that the reported expulsion from his school and he should have been on the radar of someone in local law enforcement. He was also known to the FBI as they had received at least one tip about his intentions for the shooting. His schoolmates have since come out and said he was different and that they suspected this might happen with him. Yet, no one who could do something to stop this loss of life did do something.

Where else did we fail as a society in allowing this to happen? We have a chronically broken mental health system.

My entire adult life I have worked in and around the mental health system in Maine on both the inpatient and outpatient level. We continue to view mental health as a second tier health concern. It is not seen in the same light as a heart disease or breast cancer or other physical maladies because there is no subjective nature to physical ailments. A test can tell you that you have cancer or heart disease. Mental health is harder to diagnose and harder still, in most cases, to understand. It is not easy to see.

A sobering report last year by NPR detailed the struggles of patients, who suffer from mental illness, when seeking care. In part efforts to move patients away from hospitalization has caused a real problem in gaining care. Those beds simply do not exist. Ultimately, someone like the Florida school shooter could have problems accessing emergency care.

Even when the system works the way it should, it manages to fail society. In Maine, every week there are court hearings regarding civil commitments of psychiatric patients. In the event a patient being committed to a facility the judge will inform the person that by virtue of the ruling, they are never again able to possess a firearm. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism, no database, according to the Attorney General’s Office, that maintains this list. While the patient gets help in the moment, there is no one outside of the court room that has access to this information in an easily attainable format. We, the State, ends up failing us all.

Until we treat mental illness and affairs of the mind as we do affairs of the body we will continue to misunderstand the role that mental illness plays in these types of events.

That’s my two cents…

Jonathan Crimmins can be reached at j_ [email protected]