Mental illness

The perception of mental illness in the Western world is not very good. If I am honest, we have come a long way since we were burning schizophrenics because we thought that they were demonic. But we still stigmatise mental illness as something "dangerous" or "violent". The shootings in Newtown have only served to enhance this image, with quite a lot of debate about whether Adam Lanza was mentally ill or not, with the assumption that mental illness explains this sort of violent outbreak.

The problem is twofold here. The first problem is that mental health problems do not necessarily mean that sufferers are violent. Secondly, this would be a big problem if it did, because a very substantial proportion of people in the western world suffer, at some point in their lives, from mental illness. Let me address these two issues separately.

Firstly, mental illness exhibits itself in a whole range of forms. Many people who suffer from mental illness - including myself - are not particularly violent, any more than other people. Yes, some are violent, but then some people are violent without this as an excuse. There are also a whole group of people who suffer from mental illnesses who may react more violently than others, because they act out of frustration in being unable to cope with the world around them. The truth is that this is liable to be a violent outburst at a point where their particular frustrations are being vexed. This does not make them murderous, this does not make them liable to random shooting, any more than any other person.

Of course, there is the argument that violent acts, especially like the Newtown shooting, are definitively the act of someone who is mentally disturbed. There is a truth in this, that these explosions of violence are, often, the expression of someone whose mind has been warped by (often) hatred directed to them, by someone who has found no other way of screaming their anger at the world than in this way. But that is a short term mental aberration, something that can occur to anyone. It is not about mental illness. It is about how we teach people to deal with their frustrations, about how we train people to work out their frustrations, about how we actually deal with bullying in schools or workplaces. This is not about mental illness.

The other aspect to this is that we are, as a whole, very scared of mental illness. There is a terrific fear about people who suffer from it, that we might "catch" it from people, or that they might "go crazy" on us. While these are largely unfounded, it does mean that people do not talk about their mental illness. It means that the secrecy around this perpetuates, because it continues to be a problem "out there", and not something that affects anyone we could actually know.

The truth is that it almost certainly does affect someone that we know. In reality we all know someone who has some form of mental illness, because it actually directly affects near enough half of us, and indirectly affects every one of us (because every one knows someone who is directly affected). Mental illness is something that impacts and affects everyone, and the frustrations of not being able to talk about this, not being able to be open about it, are one of the things that drives some people to having to express themselves more aggressively, more violently.

What are the lessons we should be learning about mental illness from the Newtown shootings. Nothing is the simple answer, because mental illness is not a definitive factor in the shootings. It may be that Adam Lanza had mental health issues, but that does not mean that this was the reason why he shot the school up. The other lesson is that mental health needs to be talked about openly, because not talking about it is screwing us up, and is causing many of the problems that we blame them for.