Shooting shows failures of US mental care: experts

The Arizona shooting rampage has exposed a gaping hole in the US mental health care system, according to experts and lawmakers, who said numerous red flags went unheeded before the tragedy.

Dozens of witnesses, police officials, neighbors, friends, teachers and classmates of the accused gunman, Jared Loughner, pointed to warning signs that should have alerted authorities to the 22-year-old's descent into mental illness.

There were the alarming comments to students and teachers at the community college that eventually suspended him; the reported looks and comments at his local bank, where tellers felt for the alarm button whenever he walked in; and behavior that Arizona authorities said showed Loughner hoped to acquire a firearm -- even after being rejected by the US Army for failing a drug test.

Despite what some experts believe are clear signs of emerging schizophrenia in Loughner, there is no record of him undergoing a mental health evaluation, they said.

Loughner has been accused of shooting a US lawmaker and 18 others who had gathered to meet her outside a supermarket on January 8, using a legally purchased Glock semi-automatic handgun.

Six people were killed and 13 were wounded, including US Representative Gabrielle Giffords who was shot in the head.

The tragedy has fueled intense debate on America's controversial gun laws and how such a troubled man could acquire a weapon.

But it has shone a more glaring spotlight on the US health care system, and in particular the country's inability to responsibly treat its mentally ill.

"I think the system failed miserably," said doctor Fuller Torrey, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC) which urges stricter laws requiring treatment for the mentally ill.

"This is a psychiatric failure, it's not a political failure," he told CNN on Sunday. "It's a failure of our ability to provide basic care for people who have brain diseases that are seriously mentally ill."

Arizona, Torrey and other experts say, has among the worst mental health services in the United States. Only one state, Nevada, has fewer public beds for the mentally ill.

"So even if someone tried to get treatment for this fellow, it may or may not have succeeded in Arizona, because they have cut many of their outpatient services," Torrey said.

The same could be said for virtually all 50 states.

"Nationwide, the mental health care system is broken," executive director Michael Fitzpatrick of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) said in a stinging indictment after the tragedy.

According to a TAC report, the number of hospital beds for the mentally ill has plunged by 95 percent since 1955, and three times more people with mental illness are now in jail than in hospital.

Who fills these beds, and under what conditions? The questions are crucial for a system that by its constitutional nature must balance the safety of its citizenry with individual rights.

The vast majority of people with diagnosed mental illness are not a violent threat to society. The challenge, many experts argue, is making that threat determination -- and acting on it to ensure the ill person is treated.

Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, spoke Sunday about the problem, blasting the nation's "inability to deal with mental illness and our inability to deal with it as a society."

"This man was crying out for someone who needed to be treated," he told CBS News. "You would think, at some point along the way, he'd have been evaluated."

Expansion of the health care system is unlikely in the next few years, with Republicans this month taking control of the House of Representatives and vowing to slash billions of dollars from a bloated federal budget.

But Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz, at a Tucson town hall meeting broadcast Sunday by ABC News, said "we have a tremendous gap in coverage for mental health care," and that repealing President Barack Obama's signature health care reform law, as Republicans vow to try to do, would invalidate mandates for improved mental health coverage.

As for Loughner's warning signs, Pima County sheriff's department chief Rick Kastigar acknowledged there were many.

"But each one was relatively benign," he said at the Tucson event.

"There are criticisms that say, 'Why didn't cops arrest this guy before?'" he added.

"We're bound by the law, and the totality of those issues didn't rise to the level that would allow law enforcement to take action."

At the same event, a shooting victim from the rampage was arrested after threatening a conservative leader who suggested that any debate about gun control should be put off until after the funerals for the victims.

Fuller took a photograph of Humphries with a cell phone and said "You're dead," according to two witnesses at the event.