Recently, our local weekly paper ran a column about the roots of violence in the United States, particularly with reference to the bloodshed that took place in Tucson last month. While I agreed with the author’s take on the ease with which one can acquire all manner of weapons in this country, I was unhappy with the ways in which her column perpetuated stereotypes about people with mental illness.
My response appeared this week. I’d love to hear your comments.
© 2011 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
I always, always cringe, then get incredibly angry and defensive when I hear, “with a history of mental illness’ thrown in after the news caster describes a suspect. Thanks,thanks for that. *I* have a history of mental illness. I have severe clinical depression and anxiety. I’m not saying that that person who beat some random stranger up is not guilty, I’m saying ‘history of mental illness’ means squat. What kind of mental illness? Oh, you don’t know, do you? Because it’s all just a bunch of vague rumors. Did they go off their meds and are now confused and scared and living in some crazy world in thier head? Again, doesn’t mean what they did is OK, but get.your.facts.straight. ‘Mental illness’ does not mean ‘go out and shoot everybody when I get annoyed.’ Which the media seems to perpetuate. Which in turns means I am ashamed. I’d like to see somebody WITH a mental illness report/write about someody who commits a crime/is suspected of committing a crime and is said to have a mental illness.
After the shootings in Tucson, I was dismayed that people kept saying that the young man was clearly mentally ill, as though that explained everything. The fact is that being young and male correlate to a much higher degree with committing murder than mental illness does, but no one said, “Well, obviously, he’s a young male, and that explains it,” because everyone knows that correlation is not the same as causation. For some reason, people seem unable to grok the fact that, in most cases, being mentally ill is not a causative factor, either.
I hope you can hear me applauding!
Loud and clear, bbsmum!
This is such a difficult topic! I think newscasters add in any description they can find in a desperate attempt to try to help bewildered readers make sense of such a tragedy.
As well as the “history of mental illness” phrase you will often find descriptions of the “quiet , kept to him or herself person” who ends up murdering their family or taking a rifle to school – which makes the shy or socially anxious person wonder – does everyone see me as a misfit – making the sense of social awkwardness even bigger.
Another stereotype.
I agree that the newspeople are trying to make sense of tragedy, but I’m concerned that of all the factors they could choose (an environment of violent political rhetoric, the easy availability of guns, the sense of entitlement that many people feel, the possible impact of drug and alcohol abuse, the paucity of social services, etc.) they tend to make it all about the person’s mind, as though the person were operating in a vacuum. That kind of foregrounding is very injurious to mentallly ill people who will never harm a soul. Even if the person responsible for the shootings in Arizona turns out to be mentally ill, it doesn’t mean that his mental illness made him do it. In a different sort of environment, he might have had a very different response.
Oh! Very well done! You go!
Thank you, my friend.
I didn’t get to read your response, only got “error”.
Hi Clay,
The site was being updated. It’s back up now.
Wow. Oh, wow. <–for the original article. I'm….stunned. "Faster than you can say criminally insane" "Poor souls"?
As one of those 'poor souls', I found this article not just offensive but ignorant and thoroughly stuck in the most outdated mental illness stereotypes. Yeesh.
Your response was spot-on. Cool, calm and rational. And made a lot more sense than the original article.
"Faster than you can say criminally insane", my ass.
I was really shocked by the turn the column took, especially as the writer’s work is usually very nuanced and well informed. It shows you how entrenched the stereotypes are.
Rachel,
I love your response. I have the same issues with the news always focusing on the diagnosis as if that explains everything. I tweeted your article. I think you did an excellent job of explaining why the conclusions people make are wrong.
Thanks for tweeting the article, Sue! Much appreciated.
Ah, now I’ve read it. Excellent response. I’d love to see any responses that were made to it in your local paper.
Thanks, Clay. If any responses come in, I will post links to them.
I have a particularly hard time with the concept of “mental illness.” It appears to be a simplistic explanation to describe visible behavior which is inconsistent with social expectation. It allows for a general public who read such news to say, “ok, that makes sense.”
“Mental illness” is what? Depression, Bi-Polar, Schizophrenia, etc. are found to be a function of chemical imbalance, traumatic brain injury, neurological conditions, genetics and a host of other physical limitations. “Mental” connotes a defective unholy spiritual malady . . .which people are not. Behaviors which deviate far from the norm are a function of physical processes and functions which deviate far from the norm.
I do believe that evil exists and is expressed in heinous ways; I believe that an out of control physiological system can express itself in uncontrolled rage. It is the body, the house of one’s soul, not the soul itself which is ill.
Many years ago, Thomas Szasz, wrote “The Myth of Mental Illness” (1960). Stereotyping flows from our desires to explain things and events in simplistic terms and prevents us from having to look into the core for explanations of behavior and reconciliation of the concepts of good and evil.
I agree with you, Phil: It’s the body that’s ill, not the soul. I don’t believe that the soul can ever be damaged or corrupted in any way. That’s where I find my grounding point.
I’ve long struggled with the question of whether evil exists in its own right (as opposed to being an absence of the good), and I’ve come to believe that it does. That’s one of the reasons that I have such a problem with “mental illness” as an explanation for a heinous act, as opposed to “The person chose to do evil.” When I looked at what happened in Tucson, my first response was not to simplify it down to illness. To do so takes away the element of choice. Yes, some people act out of an active delusional state in which they have no control, but to go to that explanation immediately, when one could just as easily explain it as a choice to carry out an immoral act? That makes no sense to me.
Your words are powerful, eloquent and factually stunning. Truly, you are amazing. I wish that the words you shared were made available to a much larger audience. But that audience would have to listen. And understand. And care. Sadly, I do not think that will be the norm in our lifetimes. But your voice is a gigantic step in that direction. I commend you! (for what its worth)
Thank you, Karen!
Similar things happen in the UK where a murder is committed by someone who is either mentally ill or not neurotypical. Their unusual characteristics are presented as if they were a contributing factor to their crime, even if they clearly are not or if most people with that condition do not do the things they do. A good example is the guy who carried out a sex attack and murder on a British girl in France a few years ago; the press mentioned his OCD among the “dirt” they hadd to reveal about him even though it was most likely irrelevant.
I hope that we get to the point that mentioning someone’s mental illness in the context of a crime is considered as prejudicial as referring to the person’s race or religion. Of course, some crimes can be explained by mental illness, just as some can be explained by a racial or religious agenda, but most of the time, people commit crimes for reasons having nothing to do with diagnosis, skin color, or religious practice.
It seems a tautology (think that’s a word for “circular thinking, logic loop, what-have-you”) to link mental illness with criminality (for which the definition is in itself complexly subjective).
If one accepts the premises of how the correlation/connection/association is framed, in the language of a math proof:
A=B, therefore, B=A, to no one’s surprise.
Someone commits a crime, then we call them mentally ill (“that person must be crazy”).
Someone is called mentally ill, then we attribute criminality (past, present, or future) to them.
—–
Analytically, dismissing people who commit crimes as being mentally ill (or treating the mentally ill as criminals) is simplistic, overly reductive, and unproductive.
I think that tautology is probably the way in which all prejudice becomes entrenched. It’s the basis of things like “driving while black,” because the irrationality follows the same absurd pattern: “That black man is probably a criminal; if he’s a criminal, it’s because he’s black.” I think that this is the reason that there is no arguing against prejudice with reason. It just needs to be called out and condemned as immoral.
I loved your response, Mom. Especially:
“As for the population about whom Clift speaks in such frightening terms, the vast majority of people with serious mental illness are neither deranged nor dangerous. Most are not perpetrators of violence, and are a danger to no one, except perhaps themselves. For schizophrenics, the risk of dying by suicide is greater than the risk of committing a violent act against another person; the risk of being a victim of violence is greater still.”
and
“And the antidote is not pity. Mentally ill people are not the “the poor souls” that Clift so patronizingly calls them. They are human beings — our sisters, our brothers, our neighbors, and our fellow travelers.”
You always manage to find the perfect words to refute what’s wrong with things like this.
Thank you, Ash! I appreciate the vote of support from another inveterate writer.
Thank you!
No problem!
Earlier in the comments here, someone requested link to responses (if/when they materialized) in the paper to your piece. I saw that in this week’s issue, the response by author of initial article was printed. Is there link to that you could put here, for those beyond the newspaper’s local readership ?
Hi B,
Yes, as an update to this piece, I’m going to post a separate article with the link.