It’s been a year since the shooting of security guard Bradley Haas in New Hampshire Hospital’s lobby, and some people within the facility continue to process their grief from that day.
“I think that the main thing is being together and having people recognize what each other is going through after something like this,” said Dr. Jeff Fetter. He’s the chief medical officer at New Hampshire Hospital and a psychiatrist at Dartmouth Health.
He joined NHPR’s Morning Edition host Rick Ganley to discuss how that day affected staff and patients and what he believes is needed to prevent gun violence.
Transcript
Last Sunday was the anniversary of the shooting of security guard Bradley Haas, your former colleague. I imagine Monday was a pretty hard day for yourself, for the patients and staff, too. How did you support each other over the last few days?
As a hospital, we had a number of formal offerings, including ways to express gratitude to each other. We had police comfort dogs from various police departments around, which also was done a year ago and was very well received by our staff. I think that in some ways there is no real substitute for the support of people who have gone through the same thing and to be able to be surrounded by your colleagues – to be able to talk about it, to know that you're not the only one experiencing this or that aspect of grief or anxiety or guilt. All those things are natural and we are not supposed to go through them alone.
It's also important to allow yourself to feel the fact that people are reaching out to support you. That night, the local pizza joint, Constantly Pizza, stopped making pizzas for all their orders and filled up the hospital with pizzas because we couldn't cook dinner for our patients and we couldn't feed our staff. NAMI, the National Alliance for Mental Illness, brought in peer support counselors to help our patients get through that day, and they were phenomenal, by all accounts, an enormous relief – both to the patients and to the staff who weren't sure exactly how they were going to be able to support 24 patients on an acute psych unit all by themselves.
New Hampshire Hospital serves people with acute mental illness. In what ways did the shooting affect the patients there?
Humans are highly variable, and the same is true of folks with mental illness, of course. So there were some patients, on one end of the spectrum, [who] didn't really notice it or didn't really think it was a big deal. And others who were highly affected.
Of course, the folks who perhaps were the most affected are those who actually witnessed the shooting. There were folks able to see it from the lobby. And my takeaway from having talked with some of those patients and some of the staff who supported them, was the gratitude that the patients had for the staff who got them through that difficult day.
The progress that patients make in terms of their psychosis or their mood or their suicidality, that's not the progress that I worry about from a[n] event like this. What I worry about is their sense of resilience, their sense of safety in the world, their trust that others in the world can keep them safe, and that living independently is still a live option for them. So in that sense, I worry about some of our folks.
And we have had folks who have lost ground in those ways, but there's also a sense in which mental health treatment works. And we continue to heal patients, we continue to support them and get them to a better phase of life.
After the shooting, you testified in favor of a bill that would have added certain mental health records to gun background checks. That bill ultimately failed. Why was that gun reform bill important to you, and do you hope that it can be revived in the next legislative session?
The problem that we identified is that patients who have been adjudicated as mentally ill and a danger to themselves or others are prohibited from purchasing or owning firearms in the United States. However, New Hampshire does not permit our court system to give those names to the database. So I think that there's something correct about the idea that our violence and gun violence epidemic needs to include better resources for the mental health system. But I'm identifying for folks that the mental health system needs something to do that function. And that something is a connection with an enforcement mechanism so that we can actually let them know who we've identified as being dangerous and a bad candidate for possessing a firearm.
You do feel that if this was in place more than a year ago, that this shooting could have been prevented?
I hesitate to speculate on the event itself, but I would say that what we know from the news is that this individual did purchase a firearm in a way that this legislation would have been designed to prevent, and in another state it could have been prevented. But in New Hampshire it was not.
I'll tell you one of the most difficult things for me to hear in talking about this issue over the past year has been when folks ask, 'Why wasn't Officer Haas armed?' And the reason that's hard for me to hear is because what you're really saying is Plan A should have been to shoot the mentally ill guy. These are our patients. These are our family members. These are our community. These are our neighbors. And the solution to violence and suicide in folks with mental illness has to be prevention, not the use of force as Plan A. We know these folks. These are our patients. This is personal.
