If you all remember the article I wrote a month ago, I wrote about living with a mental illness. As I was flipping through the news to find something to help me write about, I found an article along with a video of an Iraqi man in a German supermarket who was apparently trying to top up his SIM card for his cell phone. It might sound like something innocent and I won’t lie, I actually considered reading the article, but after reading a few buzzwords such as “mental illness,” “beating” and “language barrier,” my finger hit the left button on my mouse quicker than I can process the words.

From the article, the man is actually in a psych ward at the local hospital and seemed to have escaped and visited that same supermarket twice that day but the cops were called and he was then escorted back to the hospital, but seeming the third time he returned, happen to have been the last straw with the employees of the market. The Iraqi man returns for a third time that day and seems to frustrate the employee and another patron of the market, and seemingly a fight breaks out. The mentally ill man is holding a wine bottle and was asked to put it down but refuses to do so. The next thing you see is a small group of huge German men dragging this guy out and once the Iraqi man realizes he’s going outside, you see him trying to run from the door, in which the men holding him forcefully push him outside. After that, they tied him to a tree and beat him and kept him there until police arrived.

Beyond that, we don’t know what happens. We don’t know how bad his injuries are, we don’t know if he’s arrested or brought back to the hospital again, but what we do know, is that this isn’t right. This is the worst way to approach anyone with a mental illness. Better yet, one of the men in the group is a CDU politician. Going back to what I was saying, this isn’t right. You don’t tie a mentally ill person (let alone a perfectly stable human being) to a tree and beat him. This is also going back to my previous article saying that those of us with mental illnesses have a huge stigma weighing down on us. The truth is, we're normal people. We’re normal just like you, the person across from you, the person that hands you your coffee every morning and even your coworker. I understand that in other counties, that mental illness is dealt with in many different ways, some of those ways may not be humane or what we’re used to. According to PubMed, if you’re living with a mental illness in Germany, your healthcare is spread among 16 different states because their healthcare system is organized as a subsidiary system. But in regards to mental health itself, their system is broken. Six out of 20 countries in Europe also have the highest rates of suicide.

What people fail to see is that this man is also an asylum seeker, running from his countries war, but all of this comes on the heels of the last year when refugees of the Middle East are attempting to enter European counties to escape the war on ISIS. Am I saying that this is justifiable in anyway? Absolutely not. Violence is never the answer to anything, even if it’s someone who’s mentally ill. Could it have been handled a different way? Of course. But when you’re dealing with a system that’s essentially broken, it’s so difficult to get actual help.

In the end, the group of men were wrong, an asylum seeker ended back in a broken system and the stigma of mental illness still hangs over our heads. When will this ever end?