Under Construction - MHWA Retreat

So, violence is bad. We all know that. It's a throwaway statement. This might not seem like a typical ToTW that people would want to write about, but I had a discussion last year following the huge Las Vegas shooting and now I'm pretty sensitive to this topic when it comes up, and I figured some of you might have something to say about it too.

Now, I consider myself to be a generally sensitive person. I tend to be in touch with my emotions and the emotion of others. What I don't understand with violent events is society's need to assign reasoning to it. I mean, I understand why people would want to understand the WHY. But I feel like we've totally given up the idea of 'bad people' as a whole. Like, can someone not just be an awful person?

Maybe this is an area where the more detached part of my personality is coming out, but I genuinely don't understand it. The second a mass violent crime happens, people first want to know the assailant's race so they can decide the motivation. If the person is white, it is absolutely instantaneously called a mental health issue. Like, before people even know anything about the assailant's background, all you hear is, "Well if we had better mental healthcare.........."

Don't get me wrong, our healthcare system in the U.S. is a complete joke all the way around, especially when it comes to mental healthcare. We need a complete overhaul of our mental healthcare system. But, like, why do we skip over the step where we don't know anything about the assailant and we just think, hmmm, maybe they're just a really bad human.

Let's take the Las Vegas shooter as an example. Everyone was saying this guy had a mental health disorder even though he had never in 64 years been diagnosed with any sort of mental health disorder. Later, it came out that he had a very low dose anti-anxiety medication for occasional anxiety. That was like, "Yup, see, I knew it!" It was beyond bizarre to me.

People were basically saying that it makes sense that this person who had periodic anxiety, not severe enough to warrant a diagnosis and not severe enough to require daily medication, shot into a crowd of thousands of people and that made perfect sense because he had periodic anxiety. It's laughably absurd, to be honest. The U.S. alone has around 43 million people per year   dealing with a diagnosed mental health disorder. If a mental health issue had a strong causal relation to mass murderers... we'd all be seriously fucked.

Clearly, I get a bit worked up about the subject. I just think it's so wrong to instantly say, "Oh, this person was white? Damn mental illness. Whyyyyyy." Stop making excuses for people. Millions of us deal with severe mental illness all day, every day and aren't even close to violent. Mental healthcare should be much better than it is, but make no mistake, it wouldn't stop the majority of these violent events. And setting your goal as let's make sure no one diagnosed with a mental illness can ever touch a gun is one of the most shortsighted goals I've ever seen. Basically the equivalent of saying, "Hey, if you DO think you have a mental health issue, make sure you don't tell anyone or you might end up on a list of criminals people who are carefully watched."

Be honest with me, am I totally off-base here? Am I the only one who thinks someone can not be a good person without any motive or illness?

This is what I think as a random third-party observationalist whose opinion doesn't matter: I think there's a very small subset of people who believe that they deserve more than they actually do. I think these people move among us feeling overly jaded and generally aggrieved by nearly every interaction they have. To the outside observer, we might just think of them as self-interested, negative, and odd.

And then I think there's an extremely small, like, minuscule subset of those people who choose to act out on this "oppression" in a violent way. And I believe they choose to do this because they are owed vengeance for all the things they deserved in life that they weren't given, and now they feel like they have nothing left to lose. So... random people lose.

I definitely don't think it's necessary for people to freak out about mental healthcare every time an incident like this occurs. First of all, healthcare of every sort should be at the forefront of people's minds when making voting decisions in the first place. Second of all, I genuinely don't believe mental healthcare would change anything in 95% of these cases. Because these attackers don't believe anything is wrong with them. It's everyone else who is a problem. So, what would make them seek treatment? They don't want self-improvement because they don't believe they need to improve. Treatment is for people who acknowledge that they have a problem, not for people who have an external locus of control and believe everyone except them has a problem.

Either way, I think it's really sad that people who do have mental illnesses have to hear about all the ways they should be observed and limited in life. Do I want to touch a gun? No. Do I understand my country's gun culture? Um, no. But what I do know is that a lot of people in the U.S. are very much so all about their rights, so I think threatening to cut someone's constitutional rights if they get help for a mental health disorder is a slippery slope. Not only is it an emotionally-fueled response, it also might make people wonder what other discrimination they're going to face if they do seek help.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm the shortsighted one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Best,
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