Public policy: Where are the psychiatrists?
The book became available with surprising speed. Kathy Alexander, a publicity manager for JHUP told me, “While most of our manuscripts (as a whole) are reviewed by scholars in the field, this time we had multiple scholars reviewing chapters at the same time to speed up the process and to have those sections reviewed by those scholars that follow that particular angle. It was really amazing. In the scramble to get the summit and the accompanying book out, our employees gave up vacations, angered family members during the holidays, and obviously lost some sleep.” The result, however, is a wonderful, state-of-the art review of what we do and don’t know about gun violence, and while a single chapter is devoted to mental disorders, the topics of suicide and dangerousness are prominent throughout the manuscript.
When it comes to legislation regarding those with psychiatric disorders, we need a few improvements. We need to be guided by the available research, not by emotions, and we need psychiatry – as represented by those who actually treat patients – to have a voice in discussing the clinical implications.
--Dinah Miller, M.D.
Dr. Miller is co-author of Shrink Rap: Three Psychiatrists Explain Their Work (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011)
