Open Carry advocate kills husband and stepdaughter. Then drives herself to a mental hospital.

Veronica Dunnachie supporting Open Carry in Tarrant County

Courtesy of The Dallas Morning News:

An Arlington woman faces a charge of capital murder Wednesday after two people were discovered dead in her home, police said. 

Officials said they were treating the slayings as a domestic homicide. Veronica Dunnachie, 35, is being held in the Arlington City Jail, said Sgt. Jeffrey Houston, a police spokesman. Bail had not yet been set. 

The victims had not been identified and the cause of death had not been released.

Since this article the bodies were identified as her estranged husband Russ Dunnachie and his adult daughter.

After the slayings the suspect drove herself to Millwood Hospital, a mental health facility, where she was taken into custody. She was uninjured.

Separations, divorces,  child custody battles, happen everyday in this country. Usually there are harsh words, recriminations, and lawyer fees.

But when you see the world as a dangerous place, and carry a gun on your person for protection, a verbal confrontation can escalate into something far more dangerous than simply hurtful words.

Despite what the NRA might want all of us to believe, in this case at least the presence of a gun is directly responsible for the taking of life, not the protection of life.

The equation is simple; no gun = no death.

President of the Catholic League believes that secularists are unhappy and insane. Hey!

Courtesy of Right Wing Watch:  

“They believe that freedom is license to do whatever they want,” the Catholic League president explained. “They don’t want to be told anything, which is why they die prematurely, they’re unhappy, that’s why we have a disproportionate number of agnostics and atheists in the asylum, all of this is true.” 

Donohue said “secularists” have an inferior “mental health, physical health and degree of happiness,” adding: “They got to work it out, fine, I’ll help pay for their therapy, just take your hands, your mitts off the Catholics during Christmas.” 

One has to wonder just how many secularists Donohue has even knowingly met in his life.

By the way, and this is really not proof of anything definitive, but in my personal experience people who are suffering from a substantial mental health problem are quite often profoundly religious people.

In fact one of my all times craziest experiences was dealing with a young man who was in the middle of a psychotic break and having an actual back and forth conversation with Jesus about whether he should kill me or not. (Apparently Jesus said no to that. Good guy that imaginary Jesus.)

Not to be too flip but it is hard to take a person who believes that wine and crackers magically turn into blood and flesh seriously about who is, or who is not, crazy.

Just saying.

Do some forms of Christianity contribute to poor mental health? In a word, yes.

Courtesy of Salon:  

If a former believer says that Christianity made her depressed, obsessive, or post-traumatic, she is likely to be dismissed as an exaggerator. She might describe panic attacks about the rapture; moods that swung from ecstasy about God’s overwhelming love to suicidal self-loathing about repeated sins; or an obsession with sexual purity. 

A symptom like one of these clearly has a religious component, yet many people instinctively blame the victim. They will say that the wounded former believer was prone to anxiety or depression or obsession in the first place—that his Christianity somehow got corrupted by his predisposition to psychological problems. Or they will say that he wasn’t a real Christian. If only he had prayed in faith believing or loved God with all his heart, soul and mind, if only he had really been saved—then he would have experienced the peace that passes all understanding. 

But the reality is far more complex. It is true that symptoms like depression or panic attacks most often strike those of us who are vulnerable, perhaps because of genetics or perhaps because situational stressors have worn us down. But certain aspects of Christian beliefs and Christian living also can create those stressors, even setting up multigenerational patterns of abuse, trauma, and self-abuse. Also, over time some religious beliefs can create habitual thought patterns that actually alter brain function, making it difficult for people to heal or grow. 

The purveyors of religion insist that their product is so powerful it can transform a life, but somehow, magically, it has no risks. In reality, when a medicine is powerful, it usually has the potential to be toxic, especially in the wrong combination or at the wrong dose. And religion is powerful medicine!

The article goes on to describe in what ways Christianity, in particular conservative Christianity, can have a detrimental effect on the psyche of those who participate in its beliefs and teachings.

At the bottom of the article is this summation: 

Religious trauma is difficult to see because it is camouflaged by the respectability of religion in culture. To date, parents are afforded the right to teach their own children whatever doctrines they like, no matter how heinous, degrading, or mentally unhealthy. Even helping professionals largely perceive Christianity as benign. This will need to change for treatment methods to be developed and people to get help that allows them to truly reclaim their lives.

Those of us working in the mental health field have already noted a rather startling link between feelings of a direct connection to God and schizophrenia. And in fact many schizophrenics are extremely religious.

One of my pet peeves in life is the idea of ministers or priests working as therapists and addressing their congregant's emotional or mental well being.

Often they are not adequately trained and, since they tend to see things in terms of good and evil, are not equipped to identify and treat people with actual and possibly dangerous mental health problems. In my opinion a religious leader should NEVER be allowed to provide counseling unless they have been trained in a secular atmosphere that teaches scientific methodologies.

And of course there are those who simply see religion itself as a mental disease, which can and should be cured.

I may not be firmly in that camp myself yet, but to be honest I am moving in that direction more every day.

Bristol Palin, or at least the woman who plays Bristol Palin on the internet, is horrified by mother of 47 year old Down syndrome son saying she wishes she had aborted him.

Okay so just for fun I tool a jaunt over to the Brancy's blog to see what's up in the land of denial.

As it turns out Nancy French and Bristol, assuming Bristol has read what it printed under her name, are very, very upset at an article in the Daily Mail about a 69 year old woman's heartbreaking admission that she wishes she had never had her Down syndrome son, now 47 years old.

Here is what Brancy had to say:

I can’t even believe what I just read. Gillian Relf, the mother of a 47-year-old man with Down syndrome, publicly said she wishes she’d had an abortion. Her son has made her life so difficult, she wishes he had never been allowed to live. 

Can you actually claim to love someone and wish they were dead at the same time? 

If that’s not horrifying enough, she spoke “in support of the 92 per cent of women who choose to abort their babies after discovering they have Down’s syndrome.” Parents of children with Down syndrome (including my own parents!) have shown the greatest demonstration of selfless love I’ve ever seen. To read this mom’s statements that are so opposite is just stunning.

Actually I think that any person who has sat at the bedside of a dying loved one knows exactly what it is like to love somebody and wish them dead at the same time. At some point their pain is just impossible to endure and all you want is for them to find peace, even if it means you will never have them in your life again. 

Brancy goes on to say this: 

My family probably wouldn’t have chosen to have a child with Down syndrome. But God gave us Trig – and our family wouldn’t be complete without him! Now, I realize that kids with Down syndrome are amazing and wonderful – we are soooooo blessed to have him in our lives.

Actually that is a lie. Her family absolutely DID choose to have Trig in their lives. He is not Sarah's child, and I have no reason to believe that he is Bristol's child, so yes he was absolutely brought into the family as a choice. (Hopefully I will have more on that at a later date.)

By the way the woman, Gillian Relf, anticipated this response and this is what she said in the article:

But I'd challenge any one of them to walk a mile in the shoes of mothers like me, saddled for life as I am, with a needy, difficult, exasperating child who will never grow up, before they judge us. They should experience how it feels to parent a grown man, who is no more able to care for himself than a toddler - and at a time of life when your children should, all things being equal, be taking care of you. They should know how it feels to live every single day under a crushing weight of guilt. They should know how it feels to watch Stephen's constant suffering and witness the almost daily destruction wreaked on all our lives. 

As you all know I actually work with children and parents who are dealing with Down syndrome, FAS, ADHD, Reactive Attachment Disorder, PTSD,  Mental Retardation, etc., and I can tell you that wishing not to have had a child with such complicated and disruptive issues is almost universal among the parents.

They don't always say it out loud to support staff, but they certainly discuss it in private, and sometimes you can simply see it written all over their faces.

The idea that all babies are a gift from God and that HE will provide you with the strength to deal with any complications which might arise is happy holy horseshit.

The truth is that sometimes these parents simply have to give up and walk away, and put their children into residential facilities or foster homes. Sometime they mistreat their children out of sheer frustration, even though they realize it is not the child's fault. And sometimes they contemplate, or actually follow through with, plans to take their own lives. (One of the worse cases I ever dealt with.)

We have already seen that Sarah is having significant trouble parenting Trig, and let me tell you that is only going to get worse, especially when he hits his teen years.

I predict right here and now that Trig ends up in a facility, either in state or out, that will care for him within the next ten years or so.

Simply put neither Sarah Palin, or any of her family members, have the intelligence or patience to deal with a Down syndrome child for the long haul.

And that is why judging this poor woman, who has spent the last 47 years selflessly putting her child's needs above her own, should never be done by the likes of Bristol Palin.

OR her internet doppelganger.