A full psychiatric evaluation, if he’d had one, might have resulted in a temporary commitment at best, but not full-time institutionalization, experts said. The idea that more such institutions would prevent this kind of violence “is ridiculous, because you can’t put half the people in the country with a mental disturbance in mental hospitals,” said Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia University who has studied mass killers. Stephen Paddock, the man who killed 58 people with assault rifles in Las Vegas last year, had no known mental health history. The decline in mental hospitals over the past half-century is of central importance to mental health care in the United States. Around the time psychiatric hospitals began to close, weapons designed for maximum kill ratios entered the market.

Source: New York Times February 23, 2018 00:22 UTC