Letters to the Editor
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The Rest of the World Really is Crazy
For the LW here: Read, please, and then re-read what Cary has written. Written to you. I had just finished a brief screed on some forum, in response to someone who was thinking "mental illness" needed to be taken more seriously (now, all of a sudden), and while I was agreeing I was becoming concerned about the fact that there is a vast ocean of difference between the truly "mentally ill", the crazy, the quite possibly evil, and those with some slight chemical or electrical imbalance, who struggle with themselves every day and pose no real threat to anyone, who are often told so many times they have a "mental illness" that they start to refer to themselves that way. Don't do that. Read Cary's response again and begin to respect yourself as a living human being.
And as for Cary's response: I hear echoes of Jack Kerouac in here, and more. This is beautiful as well as true. This is a piece of work worth keeping. Bless the LW for posing the question and provoking this eminently worthwhile response. This is Cary on air. Responsible and yet seized, at the same time, by his true spirit, utterly sane. Thank you, CT, for letting this one fly. It's a keeper.
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But we DO need to address the stigma, NOT ignore it
There are two parts to LW's letter: his worries about his own struggles, and his worries about societal stigma triggered by the VT tragedy and how that stigma will affect him. So it's important to do more than address his worries and how he can deal with them as an individual, because the issue of societal stigma when things like this happens is huge. I have family members with severe mental illness (schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder), and so like LW I'm attuned to how the media react to events like this. It is important to address the misconceptions that the media perpetuates, because most people don't know a lot about mental illness, and they'll tend to believe what they hear.
I appreciated yehudi's distinction between "badness" and "madness", and also mikemc's use of the word "psychopath" because the "path" suffix often gets dropped, and people assume that people with psychotic disorders like schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder are "psycho". The word psychopath refers to what we now call antisocial personality disorder, characterized by a "pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others" including unlawful behavior, lying, impulsivity, aggressiveness, lack of empathy, and lack of remorse. In contrast, the word psychotic refers to disorders involving a loss of contact with reality, including symptoms such as hallucinations or delusions. The common prefix (from "psyche", meaning "soul" or "mind" - the same prefix as for psychology or psychiatry) contributes to the false public perception that people with psychotic illnesses are violent. Yes, people with untreated psychosis can behave unpredictably, and hallucinations and delusions can lead to violent acts. But the vast, vast majority of people with severe mental illnesses will never do anything more violent than those of us without such an illness, although they ARE more likely to be VICTIMS of violent crimes because their illnesses can make them vulnerable. And the vast, vast majority of people committing violent acts do not have severe mental illnesses, but chances are a lot of them do have a history of being someone we'd think of as bad or a little dangerous.
So, I think Cary missed a big part of this letter. His response to LW struck me as a little condescending, telling him he just had to live with his disease, take his medication, and try not to worry about what other people think. But the LW was raising a very important issue, of political / civil rights importance to people with severe mental illnesses: the media are portraying this tragedy as being about mental illness, and about how horrible it is that various authorities didn't clamp down on the perpetrator earlier once he'd had contact with mental health providers. I've even heard discussions on the radio of whether universities should be able to screen out people who have ever seen a mental health provider. This is really offensive and ridiculous: many people in the US visit a mental health provider at least once, for a vast range of reasons, and in fact universities provide mental health services for their students and encourage them to use them. Wanting to profile people based on a history of mental health care or a diagnosis of mental illness is the very essence of stigma against poeple with mental disorders, and so LW is writing in response to a very real resurgence of public misunderstanding, discomfort, and willingness to discriminate against people with diagnoses like his.
Regarding the VT tragedy, it is absolutely true that there are questions that should be asked about whether authorities should have seen this coming, but the things that should have triggered more action were the perpetrator's violent tendencies, antisocial behavior, and worrisome withdrawal, as well as the fact that he was judged to be a possible risk to himself. Regarding the first issues, we can ask whether someone should have worried that the violent tendencies could get worse; regarding the second, we can ask whether someone could have done a better job of getting him psychiatric help and keeping someone who might hurt himself from buying handguns. We can also make an effort to understand that, while the perpetrator had to be very disturbed to do what he did, and while we understandably tend to process events like this by thinking that the person responsible could not have been mentally "normal",
it does NOT follow that people with psychiatric diagnoses are remotely likely to do similar things -- OR that the kinds of psychological problems behind these kinds of acts are the same problems affecting most people with mental illness. There are many, many kinds of mental disorders, and they are more common than you think. They are devastating to the people who live with them and those who love them, but to the rest of the world they're pretty boring. As yehudi suggested, we need to worry about people who are "bad", not about people who are "mad".
And, if someone writes a letter pointing out that a terrible event is going to cause a rise in the public's profiling and stigmatizing of people with mental illness, we need to listen and think about it, and think about what we can do. We've gotten to a point as a society where a lot of us understand what is wrong with racial profiling, but we clearly have a long way to go in understanding the realities of mental illness and the ripple effects of events like this, and the media's reactions, on people with psychiatric disorders. Those of us who have no choice but to understand what mental illness is really like are watching another huge step backwards take place, and it's terrifying.