Steve,
I am a social worker - of the old-school Settlement House variety. I have been doing "brief, solution-focused therapy" since I was about 4 years old. 
I am now retired from gainful employment but still consider myself a social worker - it's a calling, not a job.
I have been "in therapy" a few times - because I needed assistance in seeing the trees for the forest. Some of that therapy was in offices with comfy chairs (nobody uses a couch any more) and some of it was across a bar, a kitchen table, or the front seat of a car. The only things that tissue-doling, hand-holding, hug-giving "therapy" do are provide a long chain of medical insurance reimbursement and promote a sense of victimhood. Victims are what the newspapers call those that did not make it - the ones that did are called survivors. 'That which does not kill me has failed in its mission. It also needs to watch its back from now on.'
Stuff happens. Most of the time stuff is not "good stuff". Most of that is not "bad stuff" - merely neutral stuff. When bad stuff happens you have two choices: get over it and get past it, or let it stop you in your tracks and control you for the rest of your days. Getting "over" something like this school shooting is going to be difficult and will depend a lot on how you define "getting over." Getting past it is easier, although not a walk in the sun. (Folks like Collin Goddard and his father Andrew have not gotten over or gotten past the Va Tech shooting - it's all and everything in and about their lives now. Gabreiel Giffords and her husband have certainly gotten past her shooting, and may even have gotten over it.)
stay safe.
I am neither a social worker nor a licensed therapist. Moreover, I have no formal training in the psych fields.
I have, however, spent ten years in the field as a volunteer, working with rehab cases, educational cases (both advanced and remedial), and personal enhancement. This does not include the additional five years working as an actual teacher.
Steve responded to one of my posts in another thread using the term "anti-psychiatry."
I will cop to that.
I'll spare you the anecdotes, of which there are many, but I will assert that the "science" is fundamentally flawed. They (the psych professions) have had five decades of unfettered access to the educational system, even unto state/federal funding for their initiatives. The foundation philosophy behind the psych sciences is broken, using nothing more than their work product as a measuring stick. I'm not talking anecdotal "hey, therapy helped me, my family, or my friend," I'm talking broadly, across the entire educational spectrum. With the access they've had to the institution and to the curriculum, the US educational system ought to be their crown jewel. If that's their best effort -- and it bloody well ought to be -- then I deem them a comprehensive failure.
I realize that this is essentially spitting into the wind.
They have a foothold, institutionalized state acceptance and funding, and have attained a position of unquestioned authority -- to the point where questioning their validity is grounds for being labeled crazy -- so to call them incompetent or to hint that they might, as a branch of medicine, be considered charlatans, is to court ridicule and shunning.
And yet, in spite of that, and in spite of the risk to what little credibility I might have, I assert that they are making it up as they go, have no provable universal methodology, and are still experimenting on humans.
Place your faith in them if you will; heck, you may even find one that's good at helping and has a grasp of how to improve a person's condition, but I can't look upon the cultural impact of the psych fields and bring myself to have any truck with them.
For some reason though, despite their repeated failures to predict, anticipate, or even interdict violence in their patients, the government and the public at large seem to have no problem with repeated catastrophic failures. "Guns" are the problem. "Culture" is the problem. "Parents" are the problem. "Home schooling" is the problem. "Survivalist mentality" is the problem. "Video games" are the problem. However, the quality and nature of their "treatment" is never considered or contemplated as having any contributory influence.
I would submit that there's more than a correlation.
So, yes, you may consider me numbered among the "anti-psychiatry" camp.
Think what you will of me, I can't endorse, support, or recommend them.
