Being Mentally Ill After Guns In America
I am 22 years old and already I am tired. I am tired of being told to hope for a better tomorrow by politicians who seemingly have no intention of making a better tomorrow for anyone that is not in their circle. I am tired of hearing mediocre entertainers masquerading as news anchors sensationalize any characteristic they can to be edgy without being controversial. I am tired of having to choose between playing Sisyphus everyday with society and accepting the public way of talking about people such as myself. I am 22 years old with mental illness, and it is tiring.
It is has been customary in my lifetime that in order to progress equality, one has to paint themselves, or the group they associate with, as victims. The only sense in which I think of myself as a victim is with regards to biological make up and in that sense, I know of no one who can avoid that. However just because I am not a victim does not mean that I do not have grievances, or desires to see things change for those like me.
As part of my life, I deal with Major Depressive Disorder, I have since I was 13. The symptoms and ailments that those dealing with this particular illness have been chronicled by many in fantastic books such as Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel and The Heroin Diaries by Nikki Sixx. This is not to describe my own physical and mental experiences, this is to address more public matters.
It has been a little while since yet another mass shooting has made national headlines prompting the stagnant debate over gun control to occupy talk shows and political discussion. This has purposely been written away from such an incident so as to avoid the flairs of emotion and dismissive attitudes that can accompany it. This is about the piece of conversation that gets ignored in our stagnant debate.
After the shooting at Umpqua, many of the candidates running for the highest office in the country said that the issue was not on the access to guns, but the mental health of the person who committed the crime. Republican frontrunner Donald Trump said:
“Absolutely a terrible tragedy...It sounds like another mental health problem. So many of these people, they're coming out of the woodwork. We have to really get to the bottom of it. It's so hard to even talk about these things, because you see them and it's such a tragedy.” –Washington Post October 1, 2015 (italics are mine)
I would like to be mad at Trump for saying this, but I know it is not his fault and he is certainly not the only one saying things in this way. As a country, this is the standard for talking about tragedy; we explain how it could have happened by inferring the mental issues the perpetrator had. It is natural to want answers, to look for explanations when chaos strikes.
Yet according to Heather Stuart’s essay Violence and Mental Illness: an overview, published in June of 2003 in World Psychiatry, she reported that violence in communities could only be reduced by as much as 10% if major mental disorders and comorbid disorders were removed. Furthermore, she found that those most likely to be victim to violence by those with mental illness were family members in exacerbated situations. In the end she concluded that:
“First, mental disorders are neither necessary, nor sufficient causes of violence. The major determinants of violence continue to be socio-demographic and socio-economic factors such as being young, male, and of lower socio-economic status.” (Italics are mine)
Despite this first conclusion, Stuart’s research also concluded that:
“Second, members of the public undoubtedly exaggerate both the strength of the relationship between major mental disorders and violence, as well as their own personal risk from the severely mentally ill. It is far more likely that people with a serious mental illness will be the victim of violence.” (Italics are mine)
One might ask how it is that people who are more likely to be the recipient of violence are seen as a risk to be violent themselves. There are undoubtedly several different thought processes on this, however there is not currently enough evidence to do more than speculate on how that came about.
Twelve and a half years after Stuart’s essay was published, the American Journal of Public Health published an essay by Jonathan M. Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish, which explored Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms. Their research found that less than 5% of crimes committed were by those with mental illness and that “percentages of crimes that involve guns are lower than the national average for persons not diagnosed with mental illness”. They also noted that the National Center for Health Statistics attributed less than 5% of the 120,000 gun fatalities that took place between 2001-2010 to perpetrator’s with mental illness.
Despite this information, they found a recipe of four assumptions arise after a mass shooting makes headlines in our country:
“(1) That mental illness causes gun violence, (2) that psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime, (3) that shootings represent the deranged acts of mentally ill loners, and (4) that gun control “won’t prevent” another Newtown (Connecticut school mass shooting).”
They were not lacking in examples to draw from when examining how reporters and politicians responded to mass shootings. After Sandy Hook was terrorized by violence, the New York Times suggested that Adam Lanza was an undiagnosed schizophrenic. The president of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre blamed violence in America on “delusional killers” before he called for the mentally ill to be put on a national registry. The high priestess of conservatism, Anne Coulter put a spin on the NRA’s popular slogan by saying “guns don’t kill people, the mentally ill do”.
All this heated rhetoric could be chalked up to just that; rhetoric to try and make the news more entertaining. After all, these are commentators, not policy makers. Yet in 2008, the United States Supreme Court overwhelmingly affirmed the right of citizens to bear arms with a special prohibition on firearm ownership for felons and the mentally ill because of their particular potential for violence. It seems that stereotype and stigma were their guides, not research.
It could be said that, because of my own mental illness, I am overly sensitive to the reputation of the mentally ill in the public’s eye. This is a charge that I am not qualified to dismiss, other’s can judge that on their own. While there are some who would personally lament the hesitancy to allow those with mental illness to access firearms, I cannot say that I am one of them. If I should ever purchase a firearm, it benefits both the health of society, as well as my own, for them to take an assessment of my mental health.
As I stated above, I am not a victim. I am one of millions in this country. However it does not escape my attention when politicians and reporters talk about the perpetrators of national tragedy being isolated and mentally ill, they are simultaneously isolating those of us that deal with mental illness further still. It means that not only do I often find myself having to attempt to explain what mental illness is to those around me, but I also must dispel the stigma that I am somehow a potential danger to those around me. It is the rock that I push up the hill daily and it leaves me tired no matter how well I sleep.