CONTENT WARNING: domestic violence, child abuse, guns, shooting
Liberals, we need to talk. We need to talk about how we talk about mental illness and mass shootings. See, the right has a lot to answer for—lordy, do they ever—but we’ve got some growing to do ourselves. To do that, we need to start by admitting we have a problem. Our problem is this: every single time there’s a mass shooting, we start talking about mental illness and gun control and how the GOP is shit at both and maybe if we took care of the mentally ill these shootings would just get better, be less frequent.
Well, yeah, the GOP’s position on both healthcare (including care for the mentally ill) and gun control sucks. But that’s where the tie-in stops. Because lookit: THE MENTALLY ILL ARE NOT THE ONES KILLING PEOPLE. When we conflate lack of treatment for the mentally ill with gun control after a shooting, however, we imply that the two are directly related. In reality, the mentally ill are victims of violence much more often than they are perpetrators.
Now, although it IS true that we could probably reduce gun deaths via some mental health-based restrictions, the impact would be mostly on suicides. Why? Well, one of the most common mental illnesses, depression, is also a significant risk factor for suicide. Yet, the desire to kill oneself is usually fleeting. Most people who attempt suicide and survive do not repeat the attempt, and many people who consider it never attempt it. The problem with gun suicide attempts is that they are nearly always successful. So it’s possible that an extended waiting period—a week, say—from the day the gun is purchased to the day the buyer is able to take possession could allow time for someone contemplating suicide to reconsider, to get help.
But again, that’s not where our minds are at when we bring up mental health after a mass shooting.
I get where this comes from, I think. It seems to most of us that going out and shooting a bunch of people is literally crazy. Immersed in our relative calm, it is difficult to imagine that anyone who is mentally healthy would respond to life stresses by committing a large-scale act of violence. Also—and we need to be real about this—just because we’re progressive does not mean that we’re immune to that thing where the media tends to assume that a white shooter is mentally ill (thus distancing him from the rest of us “normal” white people) and a black or brown shooter is some kind of fanatic. So we do this thing where we reflexively start talking about how America needs to take better care of its mentally ill … but we ONLY do this after a shooting.
That’s not about taking care of suffering people, guys. That’s about making ourselves feel better. When we imply that shooters are necessarily mentally ill, we unfairly stigmatize them. We can do better. We must do better.
The first step to doing better is to embrace reality. And the reality is this: the biggest predictor of violence is not mental illness. It is a history of violence. People who use violence to solve problems tend to escalate over time. They start out controlling, then shoving, then hitting, then worse. But for sure, they generally have a record of violence. Often it’s a police record, specifically of domestic violence or assault or both.
Now I come to the part of this post that is a little hard for me to write, because it’s personal, and some wounds never quite heal over. But I think it might help you understand what I’m talking about here, so I’m going to share it. I thought about sharing some friends’ stories instead: the former coworker whose boyfriend held a pillow over her face in the night until she stopped breathing. The friend’s sister who lived with domestic violence for years until one day she came home from work, only to be shot and killed by her husband, who then killed himself.
But I don’t know their stories the same way I know mine, so I’m going to tell that one, which thankfully did not end in murder.
I was an abused child. My father regularly beat us (along with nearly constant mental abuse, which I think was worse). And he was not mentally ill. He was evaluated at a mental health facility at one point, and they determined that he was not mentally ill, just “mean and vicious.” He was, simply, a violent person. That aligns with my own memories, because thinking back (at a time in my life when I’ve had some experience with mentally ill people), there is nothing in my memory that suggests that he was anything more than an asshole. An asshole with a limited toolset. An asshole who threatened to kill us when he thought my mom might take us and go. He also regularly ranted about how the world was against him. But a victim mentality is not mental illness.
By the by, speaking of other people, lots of people thought he was a decent man. Kind of goofy/funny. Like most abusers, he turned on the charm for the outside world. I can’t tell you how many people over the years told me they had thought he was a great guy. He wasn’t. So when someone “snaps” and friends and neighbors say they never suspected a thing, they’re telling the truth. But ask the families, and you’ll get a different story.
We lucked out in a few ways, though. One, my dad had an authoritarian personality, and as such, he feared those “above” him. Cops, mainly, and DFS. Two, he was physically weakened because he’d suffered from polio as a child. One side of his body was significantly impaired. He was still much stronger than anyone else in the house, though. Strong enough to bruise and break small bones. Strong enough so that when he issued his favorite pre-beating threat—”I’m gonna beat you till you have blood running down the back of your legs!”—I didn’t doubt it. And three, probably most significantly, we were really poor. So while he threatened more than once to go buy a gun and shoot us all, he never did. Guns are expensive. But I have NO DOUBT that if there had been a gun in the house, he would have snapped at some point and killed us all. I have no doubt of that because I know what it is to look into the face of someone who is beating the shit out of you in a complete rage.
What I want to impress upon you, again, is that HE WAS NOT MENTALLY ILL. He was simply a miserable, raging asshole. Sure, he had a lot of disordered thinking. How could he have not? But he did not suffer from depression, anxiety disorder, OCD, schizophrenia, or anything else that I know of or suspect. Yet I am lucky that he never killed me, my siblings, my mother, or anyone else. (Remember that “world” that was against him?)
Now, you can be mentally ill AND be violent. The two are not mutually exclusive. But violence is not a mental illness. When we conflate the two, we both hurt mentally ill people (who already have it tough) and direct attention away from the real issues.
So, just … can we not, guys? Let’s just not. Let’s focus on mental health when we talk about healthcare, not when we discuss gun control. Mental illness is a huge problem in this country, and when we say things that make it seem like we think the mentally ill are just going to spiral out of control any minute and start shooting up their neighborhoods, we only make it worse. I guarantee that you know someone who is hurt by those implied accusations. And they don’t do a damn thing to stem gun violence.
We can do better. We MUST do better. That’s it. That’s all.
