COMING SUNDAY: Mom Whose Son Struggled with Mental Illness Says Shootings Should Change Conversation in Iowa, Nationally

From the time seven years ago when she found her son curled in a fetal position under a blanket in a southern Iowa train station until his sudden death last September, Loretta Sieman shuddered at every breaking news report of a mass shooting.

The gunman could have been her son, Kevin.

A once-gregarious West Des Moines Valley High School football star and student leader, he was diagnosed as an adult as having delusional paranoid schizophrenia. Sieman says the parallels between her son’s symptoms and those of the killers in a spate of mass shootings, including last month’s horrific violence at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newport, CT, are hauntingly similar.

She and other mental health advocates believe such events open a narrow window of opportunity to expand the conversation beyond a flurry of gun-control proposals to “change the conversation” about mental health care in Iowa.

The mental health agenda before the upcoming session of the Iowa Legislature, which convenes Monday, is limited to funding last session’s massive overhaul of the mental health delivery system.

However, mental health advocates argue that unless lawmakers are prepared to provide substantial and sustainable funding, reform efforts will fall short, as they have in the past. They believe policymakers should broaden the scope of their discussion and regard America’s growing mental health crisis as a public health issue.

Nationally, one in 17 Americans lives with a serious mental health illness – a startling rate of incidence that should prompt discussion about mental health in the broader context of a public health issue, said Earl Kelly, who oversees one of the state’s largest community-based mental health serices.

In Iowa, about 180,000 people, or 6 percent of the population, have a serious mental illness.

“If we were talking about an outbreak of (tuberculosis), as they are in northern Europe right now, it would definitely be seen as a public health crisis,” Kelly said. “Something would get done.”