Is having the conversation about mental illness and horrendous violent crime stigmatizing? [View all]

[Arcana]

I hang around tumblr a lot, which is notorious for being full of the type of liberal activist that only cares about LGBT/race/discrimination issues and no other important issues, and in a way that is obnoxious such as denying the science that proves being obese is unhealthy, and defending people who say they identify as animals, hobbits, elves, and Navi'i and tossing around words like "oppression", "privilege" and "erasure" out of context and applied to every little thing. Fortunately not everyone there is like that and people are working to restore "sanity" there, but still a lot of things spread there are kinda...very questionable but don't sound as outrageous as a PETA vegan so are still agreed upon by thousands.

One of those things is the idea that talking about mental illness in relation to recent mass shootings is stigmatizing and "hurtful", even if it means not talking about the role it has played in the recent cases.

There’s something I want to say about the Connecticut shooting that hasn’t been sitting well with me and it’s how a lot of people talking about this shooter are quantifying his motivations as being due to mental illness

I know a lot of people who follow me don’t really seem to buy social theories about white privilege and ableism (to be frank, I don’t know why you’d be here if you don’t, but that’s another discussion altogether) but here’s why doing that is kind of hurtful

Very few, if any of these sorts of tragedies are caused by mental illness when the killers are professionally evaluated and that’s because more often than not, these are not regrettably avoidable instances where proper psychiatric care would prevent them - they’re the power fantasies of privileged white males who grow up in a culture of fetishized violence

This is important to note for two reasons

If the killer wasn’t white, the media would have absolutely no problem calling it terrorism or levying allegations of gang connections
People with mental illnesses are not ticking timebombs and there are huge differences between mental illness and mental disturbances and people who suffer from mental illnesses severe enough to push them to do something like this show extremely troubling warning signs long before they have the chance to do something, if they’re not already incarcerated for lesser crimes
I know you guys think you’re contributing to a positive and accepting discourse by saying one of the ways we can learn from this horrific event is to provide better care for people with mental illnesses but what you are doing is implicitly adding an “or else…” to the end of that sentence and that’s very hurtful to a lot of people, some of whom I bet you care about

http://confusedtannenbaum.tumblr.com/post/38066464468/theres-something-i-want-to-say-about-the

And then there's this article which is not hosted on tumblr but has been spread around tumblr, which criticizes the "I am Adam Lanza's Mother" article as "objectifying" and suggests misogyny as an alternate source of preventing mass shootings.

I think they do have a point, that we should be very careful about how we discuss mental illness in the context of violent crime. However I don't think we should ignore the role it has played in previous mass shootings(not to mention Cho in the Virginia Tech chooting was not white) nor in other cases like Tarasoff and Andrea Yates and Hinkley. This is something that needs to be talked about among professionals and policymakers, even though it may be twisted by ignorant members of the general public. Lets not forget that Seng-Hui Cho, James Holmes, and Jared Loughner were all simply booted out and not given additional help.

Just because of stigma does not mean we should shut our mouths about it when it has some real basis on reality, especially when a death toll is involved.

Mass shootings are rare events statistically, but that does not remove how devastating they are and their death toll.

I say this as someone who has been though a shitty American, state-run community mental health care system myself.