Lieberman Stops The Violence Analysis

Lieberman Stops the Violence In December of 2012, Adam Lanza drove to Sandy Hook Middle School and and fatally shot twenty children, six adults, his mother, and finally himself. In June of 2015, Dylann Roof killed nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Although those incidents are seemingly isolated, Lanza and Roof both have something in common; a complicated past that would signal that they were grappling with mental issues long before they committed the crime. These cases and countless others reveal the connections between mental health and violence, suggesting that some changes need to be made if we want the violence to stop. Jeffrey Lieberman, a psychiatrist, successfully argues that at the root of the violence is a failure to diagnose and treat mentally ill people early and a lack of a substantial healthcare system. By relying on his status and experience as a psychiatrist and offering many solutions that would appeal to his audience, Lieberman alerts readers to the …show more content…
He starts with a story about Vester Lee Flanagan II, another “perpetrator with a troubled past”, which draws attention to the issue at hand. Immediately afterwards he directs that same attention to himself as an authority on mental health and violence. Lieberman introduces himself as a psychiatrist, which is a physician who specializes in the diagnosis, treatment, study, and prevention of mental disorders. He has a “30-year” career, has “treated thousands of patients with serious mental illness[es]” and has reviewed several criminal cases. Not only is Lieberman a psychiatrist, but he is the author of “Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry” and the chairman of psychiatry at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York. As a result of his status and experience, Lieberman can confidently state his argument without seeming self-assertive or uninformed to the