Mental Health & Gun Violence; or, How to Hurt Both Causes

This short piece was initially posted on a now-mostly-defunct tumblr page not long after the Las Vegas shooting. Sadly, the narrative has proved so repetitive that it doesn’t even need an update.

There have been so many mass shootings just in the past couple of months: Las Vegas, Antioch (near where I live), Sutherland Springs. Maybe not in that order, and definitely not limited to them — that’s only what I saw in the news and can remember. And in the wake of them, everyone tosses around what they personally think might help prevent more mass killings — as they should, even though some of them come across as less than sincere. I’m not going to offer anything here, because a) I don’t want this to be an overly political rant, and b) it’s not like I know much to begin with.

But I do take issue with one annoyingly constant trope in all of this, which goes back many years and an uncountable number of mass shootings: Mental Health.

Whenever a massacre occurs, mental health inevitably comes up. Gun advocates invariably point the blame there, whether or not there’s any actual evidence that the shooter was, in fact, severely mentally ill. Most recently, the president said it was an issue of “mental illness at the highest degree” (those may not be his exact words, but I’m not going to look it up because I already feel like vomiting). And progressives, too, cite a need for an improved health care system as salient to curbing our obvious problem with gun-related crime.

I suffer from mental illness, and I am vocal about the need for compassion, support, and a system that guarantees that people can get the care they need. And that makes it all the more maddening that “mental health” is one of the first topics to come up whenever we’re talking about violence.

I can’t help but feel that, intentionally or not, this argument implies that those with depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and a plethora of other illnesses and personality disorders should immediately be construed as a threat to public safety, not as human beings who are probably not going to harm another human being but are quite likely to harm themselves. Who wants to be slapped with a label that brands them as someone who might murder their family, or shoot up a nightclub? Even if we do improve our health care system, won’t it be for naught if someone refuses to seek treatment because they don’t want to be viewed as a threat to society? There is enough stigma as is, do we need to put up yet another barrier? Especially when there is already plenty of evidence that the connection between mental illness and mass shootings is tenuous at best? (I’ll put a couple of links below.)

These shootings are horrific and heartbreaking, and politicians who sit around doing nothing, using lazy arguments to deflect the issue, are only making it worse.

But I hate it when mental health is used as a political talking point rather than seen as an endemic issue all of its own. It’s a cause that is very dear to me. I want to see it publicly discussed in a proper context, not used as a cheap tool for hand-waving or for avoiding difficult questions instead of doing some much-needed soul-searching.

This is just another example of well-intentioned discourse having unfortunate, unintended consequences towards those who suffer from very real and sometimes debilitating psychiatric illnesses, both in the public perception towards them and towards their own perceptions of themselves. Gun violence is a very real issue. Mental health is a very real issue. And by conflating the two of them, we are doing an enormous disservice to both.

Sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/health/mass-murderers-mental-illness.html?_r=0

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/11/mass-shootings-committed-mentally-ill-171111162521074.html

This was originally posted on Medium. Lemme tell ya, Medium was a terrible landlord.