In the aftermath of the Oregon shooting, thousands of people, particularly the families of the victims, are still shocked by the outcomes of this event. Many may condemn the shooter, Christopher Harper-Mercer, a young man of 26, for such atrocities, while others have placed the blame on our gun laws. Such an event should not be taken lightly, from either side of the story.
I really hate to bring this up in the wake of a shooting, but I believe it needs to be stressed again and again: I had written an article earlier about suicide awareness, discussing how we address the topic of mental health -- a stigma many people want to avoid. Instead, when it comes to the shootings, we of course return back to gun control, a hot button debate that’s repeatedly discussed but never settled. Yes, there are a lot of things politicians, debaters, and lobbyists like to argue about, but never really step up to the plate. One of them is mental health.
On the October 4th episode of "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver," our title host decided to bring up the way our country handles mental health. Of course, it is not always appropriate to frequently associate the subject of mental health to school shootings, yet it does give us an opportunity to discuss the quality of mental health care in our country. Regardless of how we want to approach the subject, an action must be taken, not just a cry.
According to resources picked up by Oliver, approximately two million people with mental illnesses are locked in state or local jail cells rather than in institutions. More tragic is the idea of “Greyhound therapy,” a term of mockery to the way institutions deploy many mentally ill patients on a bus to some other place due to overcrowding. This can be due to a number of reasons, including underfunding, lack of proper management or just complete ignorance from the staff. Because these patients might not be improving, we decide the best strategy is to toss them aside like a busted computer. What I found most shocking was the fact that "....nearly 125,000 young and middle-aged adults with serious mental illness lived in U.S. nursing homes last year."
Assertive community treatment is a program, Oliver says, that has been successful in developing a proper plan to addressing mental health; this is an intensive program that caters to patients with seriously debilitating symptoms that affect their work, relationships and general welfare. By having social workers and community members help to monitor their living situations, this program is doing “everything that it takes” for mental health patients to live independently. “Everything that it takes” certainly sounds better than prisons or deporting patients on Greyhound buses.
What distressed me the most about Oregon was what Mercer wrote in his manifesto how this attack “could not have been prevented.” Clearly, he would have found a way to do this: gun or no gun. The attack on these students was an attack on the way life treated him, but with a completely impulsive decision to take it out on others. Now, if the attack were on himself, suicide, our image of the shooter would be different. If these people are not left to believe that they have no other option than destruction, then our system is rather flawed. You may care about victims of such tragedies (or pretend to care), but leave aside the non-superficial tragedy -- the tragedy of the mind.
Many will read this and think, “Okay, mental illness might be a problem,” and feel that we just won’t have to do anything -- change is bound to happen eventually. We can actively promote ways to reduce stress, like meditate, exercise, listen to music, etc. But here I’m talking about mental illness, which means these things are negligible (though not ineffective) compared to the pain that psychopathology can inflict. This encompasses a whole range of mental illnesses. I think maybe we’re afraid to understand this more for the fear that we might become susceptible to it, or the inevitable nature of stress and mental terror that comes in many forms. We don't want to think about it. If we want to properly treat this issue, both ends of the process must be working. That is, if you want to help somebody, help them, and if you want to be helped, you must seek it.
It is true that such programs that try to treat mental health are brutally underfunded and contain employment issues, which is why such services are better off paying for themselves (like the ACT program). The best way I believe we can handle mental health on an individual basis is to treat these issues such as anger, thoughts of suicide, hopelessness, as facts. It doesn’t have to cost tons of dollars, only a shred of humanity. Though we might not believe in their irrational actions, they do. I’m not sure what these people think, nor are you.
But I do know one thing: empathy, in its simplest form, is the automatic recognition of another’s quality of thoughts and emotions, with pretext of an unbiased judgment of said qualities. I say automatic because that’s how it appears to me. I do not consciously try to invade another person’s mind and think the way she does, and react to a situation the way she would. Rather, I understand the other’s stance in this world, in this universe, that is rather microscopic, but nonetheless, has a place in the grand scheme of problems. People who, let’s say, contemplate suicide react to this idea very strongly.
I believe that people who commit these acts of violence do it more out of a cry for help, though their actions aren't justifiable in any way, shape or form. I am no way saying that what he did was right, but it’s a chance to see what happens when our system fails to acknowledge these risks. Not to mention the permanent damage done to the victims’ families.
It is not right to point to one factor contributing to this mess, but we have to realize that the mind is highly unpredictable and volatile. I am sorry that these victims had to become entangled in the web of this man’s decisions, no one deserves to pay that price.
