Everytime another school shooting breaks the news, I wait for it… the inevitable backlash against the mentally ill. Every time, I consider retreating back into quietly coping with my mental health and not speaking a word to anyone.
For years I dealt with my disorders in quiet. When my mother first signed me up for therapy, I was embarrassed and went out of my way to keep this from all of my classmates. When one of them happened to walk into my doctor’s waiting room, we made a vow to each other to never tell a soul. Since then, however, we both have become more comfortable with our conditions, especially me. Instead of cowering in fear from them, I have taken to becoming an advocate for mental health research and creating an open dialogue about my problems. It’s my belief that I must lead by example and be open about my conditions so that others may find the confidence to come forward and get help. This, though, has not always been easy.
In times like these when emotions run high, people begin to blame the unknown… and in this case, that means people with mental illness since there is a general ignorance about mental health in our world.
I hear your call for gun control legislation and I’m not even touching that issue because it is a whole article in itself. Instead, I want to focus on the targeted idea of “mental health” checks as a part of gun control. These are downright discriminatory and impractical.
Firstly, we must destroy the notion that mentally ill people are inherently dangerous to others. In fact, the majority of violent crimes are committed by people who are not mentally ill according to Time To Change. The research was done by James L. Knoll IV, M.D. and George D. Annas, M.D., M.P.H. asserts that less than 1% of mass shootings are committed by someone with serious mental illness. These people are more likely to hurt themselves than others. And to those who argue that the suicidal should not be allowed to purchase a gun, I understand what your intentions are, but a restriction like this will be ineffective in reducing suicide for a wide variety of reasons.
Many people who are “suicidal” are not actively suicidal, but otherwise passively in a way that does not mean they are an active threat to themselves. These people may constantly think about suicide, but have no plan to follow through. Due to this and the stigma against mental illness, figuring out who exactly is suicidal is extremely difficult. Therefore, keeping them from buying a gun is nearly impossible. Imposing “psych evals” to check for suicidality is inefficient because, quite honestly, it's not hard to lie about your mental state. Let’s not forget that the top way to commit suicide is typical by hanging or overdose-- not guns.
Secondly, mental illness is tricky to categorize, let alone quantify. Legislation often operates based off strict definitions and qualifiers. By saying we want to “stop mentally ill people from having guns” we have to further define this. I have seen very few advocates who have been able to lay out a clear, unproblematic definition.
Mental illness comes in many forms and in many degrees. Someone who has a minor anxiety disorder isn’t necessarily more violent and most rational people arguing for gun restrictions against the mentally ill would agree with this. However, people often then argue that people with “scarier” disorders like bipolar disorder (manic depression) or schizophrenia should be the ones targeted by this legislation. However, yet again, these disorders come in many different forms and levels of severity. Most of the time, people with these disorders are so functional that they go undiagnosed or you can’t even tell that they are living with them. There is no unit of measure to say how mentally ill someone is. Plus, physicians have different beliefs in what makes someone dangerous, so leaving it up to the discretion of a physician is extremely inconsistent and could potentially leave for an error of bias.
Another major issue with gun restrictions against the mentally ill is the privacy violations. As I mentioned before, I grew up extremely uncomfortable about my mental illness. Due to this, forcing a citizen to disclose their treatment status is to the government raises some moral flags. The risk of this information getting out to the public can discourage people who value owning a gun from pursuing the help that they need.
In these times there is an attraction to blame the mentally ill. We try to rationalize those who commit these crimes. In an attempt to separate them from the general public and push them further from being considered “human” we label with as mentally ill. We don’t like to think that we or someone we love could be capable of this act. By pushing this label on them we thus validate that there was something mentally wrong with that person and therefore we do not have to worry. However, the facts are simple: mentally ill people aren’t the problem.
Stigma around mental illness is, though. “Gun restriction laws focusing on people with mental illness perpetuate the myth that mental illness leads to violence, as well as the misperception that gun violence and mental illness are strongly linked. Stigma represents a major barrier to access and treatment of mental illness, which in turn increases the public health burden,” states James L. Knoll IV, M.D. and George D. Annas, M.D., M.P.H. in “Mass Shootings and Mental Illness”. They also further claim that “Laws intended to reduce gun violence that focus[es] on a population representing less than 3% of all gun violence will be extremely low yield, ineffective, and wasteful of scarce resources. Perpetrators of mass shootings are unlikely to have a history of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. Thus, databases intended to restrict access to guns and established by guns laws that broadly target people with mental illness will not capture this group of individuals.”
The facts are simple. Mentally ill people are not your threat. Stop demonizing a large part of our population amidst your fear and start thinking rationally about what steps we can take to prevent an atrocity like this from ever happening again.
If you or someone you know is suicidal, please call: 1-800-273-8255