Shamar Elkins Kills 8 Children As Questions Grow Over Mental Health Failures. – ThyBlackMan.com

(ThyBlackMan.com) Shamar Elkins is a monster. There is absolutely no other way to describe someone, anyone, who guns down eight babies. And that’s exactly what the eight innocents that he murdered are. The blame finger for his hideous crime fell quickly on two perennially troubling maladies. The plague of domestic violence against women. One of his shooting victims was no surprise his wife. Mercifully, she survived. Despite mountains of laws to counter domestic violence and abuse, that type of violence is still the quasi norm in male-female relations.

But it’s the other malady that in Elkins case also deserves a hard look. That’s the mental health crisis in America. Reports are that Elkins sought help. He spent ten days at a Veterans Affairs hospital for psychiatric evaluation. However, he was discharged. And this is where the horror for him and millions of Americans begins.

There are tens of millions of Americans that fall into the serious mental health challenge category. The numbers tell the tale of the magnitude of the mental health crisis in America. A 2024 poll by the National Alliance on Mental Illness found that nearly sixty million Americans reported a mental health affliction. That was one in five adult Americans.

However, that tells only a small part of the tragedy. Blacks, Native Americans, and LGBTQ persons suffered vastly disproportionate incidents of mental illness. Overall, one in five Black adults, and Native Americans reported one or more mental illness disorders in 2024. They ranged from chronic depression to Reiner’s reported affliction– schizophrenia.

That’s one part of the sordid story of the mental health peril. The other is who receives treatment and who has access to treatment. That inevitably points the finger at racial bias in relation to cost and accessibility. A Department of Health and Human Services survey in 2024 found that only one in three Blacks and Hispanics received treatment. Similar treatment disparities were found for Asian American and Pacific Islanders. Meanwhile, nearly one out of two whites received treatment.

The multiple reasons for the wide gap in treatment have been oft cited. One is the absence of access to treatment centers in minority and lower income neighborhoods. Poverty, lack of health insurance, underinsurance, or part of the economic barrier to treatment for many.

Another is the prevalent stigma of seeking treatment for a mental health issue. For many this is still viewed as a sign of weakness or personal failure. Thankfully, that fear and notion is breaking down as the crisis within minorities communities deepens. Elkins again is an example. At least he had enough presence of mind to seek help.

Still, a 2023 Rand Corporation study found a widespread pattern of deliberate closing of the mental health treatment center door to aid even when Blacks and Hispanics seek help. The impediments included shorter hours, lack of available services, untrained staff, little time, or effort spent on outreach programs and information on services, and lack of Spanish speaking aid workers.

A major university research study in 2000 on the impact of racial bias on mental health diagnosis and treatment, Racism and Mental Health: the African American Experience, noted, “The stigma of racial inferiority may also adversely affect the treatment of black patients in the mental health system. Black clinicians have long argued that popular misconceptions, inaccuracies, and stereotypes of the psychology of African Americans could lead to the misdiagnosis of Black patients.”

The study went further and observed that African Americans are more likely to be misdiagnosed. It specifically cited schizophrenia. Blacks were more likely to be diagnosed with the malady of paranoid schizophrenia. And at the same underdiagnosed with other affective disorders. The researchers chalked this up to “conscious or unconscious acceptance of negative stereotypes of Blacks.” The inaccurate diagnosis clinicians seemingly routinely made over time of many Blacks with a mental health affliction had grave consequences in terms of tailoring the correct and most effective treatment to the patient.

The KFF Policy Research Foundation further underscored the crisis in mental health treatment disparities in a comprehensive report in 2024 Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Mental Health Care: Findings from the KFF Survey of Racism, Discrimination and Health. It checked off the number of areas where the mental health care system failed Blacks, and people of color and the poor.

That includes the absence of treatment facilities in lower income, underserved neighborhoods, the types of treatment and care offered in the paltry number of centers in these neighborhoods. In almost every instance, the report noted widespread differences in how whites reported the level of and accessibility to the treatment they received versus the dismal to non-existent treatment Blacks received.

Whether Elkins would and definitely should have gotten prolonged treatment would have saved the lives of eight babies, we’ll never know. What we do know though is that Elkins is a monster, and a callous system did its part to help create that monster.

Written By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

One can find more info about Mr. Hutchinson over at the following site; TheHutchinson Report.

Also feel free to connect with him through twitter; http://twitter.com/earlhutchins

He is also an associate editor of New America Media. His forthcoming book is From King to Obama: Witness to a Turbulent History (Middle Passage Press).