Dr. Garfield Clunie: Stress in America

Transcript: I think that one of the issues with gun violence in America is that there’s too much access to guns. And I think what happens is mental illness is not really paid attention to as much as it should be by the medical profession, because I think insurance and access is a big issue. And so people don’t have coping mechanisms when they encounter stressful situations. And they don’t many times they don’t have peers to turn to or they may have, you know, a single parent who was out of the house a lot. And they just don’t have those coping mechanisms because there’s so much access to guns and guns, sometimes equal power that people turn to using guns to sort of express themselves. And unfortunately, it’s gone rampant in the Black community, and we really have to work on reducing the amount of access to guns that are coming into the community. That’s that’s a big problem. Regarding mental health, I think that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Javier Becerra, there’s some programs that he’s putting in place that are creating funding for mental health. And also, one thing that’s very important is the 9-8-8 hotline, where if you’re having any challenges, you can call 9-8-8 to get help. And one of the reasons why that’s so important is because sometimes the police may be called when there’s a mental break or sort of a mental breakdown or deterioration. And that can sometimes escalate to a violent situation. And because there are like I said, guns rampant, This really creates a very, very difficult situation within the Black community. From the National Medical Association perspective,  I mean, we think gun violence and health they’re very interrelated because again, it’s mental health, it’s stress. It’s what’s going on in our community. It’s social determinants of health, all of it ties into what happens. And so we created a, what we call the gun violence task force, because we realized that we need all hands on deck just not the policing community, but the medical community as well. And we’ve turned it into a formal Council, a permanent counselor within our organization. And we have people who do legislation and community workers, physicians all putting their heads together on how to solve the violence issue in our community, which is really, really important.