Ok, I'm going to speak from personal experience here too. My mom tried a million things to connect, get me interested, whatever. However, none of them were at the shooting range. I wholly agree with the idea of trying nearly everything to connect with your mentally ill child, but I don't think that that is a good or responsible way of going about it. I mean, I've been free of serious symptoms for ten years, and I still refuse to have a gun in my house, because it makes any violence I might become prone to (toward myself or others) 100% too easy.

That and you can't go giving the entire population a psych eval.  For starters, there aren't enough qualified psychologists and the potential harm for a misdiagnosis from an UNqualified psychologist is massive.

I heard a story on NPR awhile back about the PCL-R, a checklist of traits associated with psychopathy.  It's a good test; it's scientific and it's reliable.  But prisons have started employing it to determine whether inmates should be allowed parole.  That's not what the test is intended for, and its own author, Robert Hare, is opposed to its use in that context.

Quote

While Hare remains a strong believer that his test works well for the kind of basic scientific research that it was originally designed for, he and others have begun to wonder if it does as good a job outside the lab.

"Once you get into the real world, there does seem to be some lessening of reliability," says Daniel Murrie, a professor at the University of Virginia who has studied what happens when psychological tests are taken from a rarefied research environment and transferred to the rough-and-tumble world of criminal justice.

About four years ago, Murrie decided to study the PCL-R to look at what happened when a psychologist hired by the prosecution gave Hare's test to the same prisoner as a psychologist hired by the defense.

Did those two psychologists give the same score to the same person?

The answer, says Murrie, was no. "Ten, 15, even 20-point score differences we found," he says, " And overall there was about an 8-point difference in scores."

The question is why. One possibility, Murrie argues, is that the psychologists using the test in prisons and courts might not be well-trained.

"We don't know if the people giving the test in the field have gotten formal, rigorous training, or if they've just sort of bought the manual and maybe read a couple of papers and just decided to start using it," Murrie says.

But Murrie thinks it's also something else. He says that in his study, psychologists hired by the prosecution consistently gave higher scores than psychologists employed by the defense.

Probably, Murrie says, because they're being paid for those opinions, and that money influences them.

Basically: the test, properly employed, is a very good test -- there are studies correlating its results with a convict's likelihood to re-offend.  On those terms, it seems like a damn good tool for protecting public safety by gauging the danger of releasing a felon back onto the streets.

But in real life, the test isn't always conducted competently or impartially.  It's reliable in the lab, but not in the criminal justice system.  And of course once you brand somebody a psychopath, there's no parole board in the world that's going to be willing to let him out, let alone any elected official who'll be willing to sign off on it.

That's an extreme example, and not directly relevant to the subject at hand.  (I am, of course, totally cool with convicted violent criminals being denied the right to own guns, whether they're sociopaths or not.)  But it's a good example of the potential problems with putting mental health diagnoses in the hands of people who may not be qualified or who may have ulterior motives.

It's also the closest thing to logic that can be attributed to murdering a classroom full of preschoolers.

Nancy Lanza owned guns for self-defense, her former sister-in-law Marsha Lanza said.

You know, Shinra, I'm getting a pretty strong "brand the insane" vibe off your train of thought here. I have bi-polar 1, and a history of severe mood swings, and the only medication I take is for anxiety. Should I be carrying around a sanity license?

Yeah, if you read stuff about Breivik he seems pretty well in his right mind. His killing was justified in his mind by his own set of beliefs, not because he had hallucinations or whatever.

Actually, my point is that in order to declare Adam "mentally ill" you have to assume things about him which you do not know. If our basis for calling him insane is that he killed a bunch of people randomly, then we have an entire military to call insane. Not that that probably isn't the case.