Every time there’s a widely publicized shooting or other act of violence, we blame it on mental illness, at least in part. Why do we do that? Is it correct? Is it helpful? In the week since the Orlando shooting, I’ve been wondering about mental illness.
I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I can’t make diagnoses and classifications – I can’t speak the lingo. But I’ve done a fair bit of relevant reading over the years, and I pay attention to people. In any case, I’m not writing as a professional analyst of people who may or may not be mentally ill. I’m writing to ask the rest of us to think about what it means when we assume someone who does something terrible is mentally ill, particularly considering the vast majority of people who are mentally ill are not violent or dangerous in any way.
Mental illness is many things
The National Alliance on Mental Illness says
A mental illness is a condition that impacts a person’s thinking, feeling or mood and may affect his or her ability to relate to others and function on a daily basis. Each person will have different experiences, even people with the same diagnosis.
That’s a pretty broad definition – mental illness is a lot of different things. And it’s not totally dependent on the person in question – the definition speaks of the “ability to relate to others and function.” Sometimes you can’t relate to others because the others in your life are toxic. Sometimes you can’t function in society because society makes unreasonable assumptions and demands. Jiddu Krishnamurti said “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Another quote of recent but uncertain origin says “before you self-diagnose yourself with depression, first make sure that you are not simply surrounded by assholes.”
But we know from observation if not from first-hand experience that mental illness is a real thing. Sometimes it’s caused by a variation in brain chemistry. That’s a medical cause that usually calls for medical treatment. That’s why I get so irritated with people who claim anti-depressants and similar drugs are just capitalist schemes to make money. In total our society is overmedicated, and drug companies’ emphasis on profits over people is obscene. None of that changes the fact that people who have chemical imbalances can be helped by medication.
Sometimes mental illness is caused by trauma. Being raised by an abusive parent, living with violence (whether domestic, military, criminal, or otherwise), living in extreme poverty or under great stress can cause mental illness. Sometimes it’s caused by culture, particularly if you live in a culture that’s at odds with your core values and identity.
So in the great question of nature vs. nurture, the cause of mental illness is sometimes one, sometimes the other, and sometimes both.
Some people who commit terrible crimes are clearly mentally ill by any definition or standard. But again, mental illness isn’t one thing. It’s many different conditions that many different people have to many different degrees. Saying “he did something terrible so he must be mentally ill” doesn’t tell us much.
I find it interesting that people who carry out mass murders by themselves are assumed to be mentally ill, while people who carry out mass murders in groups are not. I’m not sure what that means, but it means something.
Calling mass murder “mental illness” gives us a simple explanation for something that is usually anything but simple. Based on the statements of the people who knew him, I think it’s likely the Orlando shooter was mentally ill, to one degree or another. But it’s pretty clear homophobia was the big driver. So was easy access to guns. So was his attraction to a violent perversion of Islam. So were probably a dozen other things we haven’t even heard about. It’s never just one thing – it’s always complicated. And when we oversimplify complicated issues, we’re always wrong.
Othering
Labeling people who do horrible things as mentally ill allows us to separate ourselves from them. It lets us tell ourselves “there must be something wrong with him – I would never do that.” But when we look at history, we realize we aren’t so different after all. The Stanford Prison Experiment. Abu Ghraib. The ordinary Germans of the 1930s and 40s who went along with Hitler and worked in death camps. Yes, these are examples of groups, not individuals – the point is that it doesn’t take much for ordinary people to be convinced to do horrible things. Some are just able to get there on their own.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time exploring the darker corners of my soul. I can’t see any way, short of a personality-warping brain injury, that I could ever walk into a nightclub and start shooting people at random. I can’t even see myself shooting up the Westboro Baptist Church. But if someone intentionally harmed someone I love? I can see myself doing some things that are properly illegal and not in alignment with my values. I suspect that will remain a hypothetical situation, and I pray it always does. But the potential for doing something that would cause someone to say “he must have been mentally ill”? Yeah, that’s in me.
It’s in you too. The real miracle is that it doesn’t come out more often than it does.
Some people say we blame everything on mental illness because we don’t believe in evil any more. There’s some truth to that. But while evil as a force may or may not exist, a diagnosis of evil was often used in the same way we use a diagnosis of mental illness – as a way of distancing ourselves from someone who has done something horrible. At least we aren’t burning mentally ill people at the stake. But we know the capacity for evil exists in all of us, and the othering we do with those who do great evil is mostly a lie for our own comfort.
What would a world without mental illness look like?
We’d all like to see an end to depression, to anxiety, and to conditions that cause young men (it’s almost always young men) to pick up a gun when they feel wronged. But remember that mental illness isn’t cancer or the flu – it’s not some invader that needs to be wiped out and then everything goes back to normal. With mental health, “normal” is an arbitrary standard defined by mainstream society – “mental illness” is a variation from that standard.
How much variation would we tolerate? Who gets to decide? What happens when no one varies from “normal” anymore? We all know someone who’s “odd” or “a bit off” who does something really really well – that’s almost a stereotype of a genius. Many brilliant artists struggle with mental illness – how much would we lose if we medicated them out of existence? If there was no variation in mental states, would we have any shamans, spirit workers, or God-speakers?
I was in counseling for depression for a while in my 20s. I remember arguing with the counselor “I don’t want you to make me feel good about the way things are, I want you to teach me how to make things better!” At that point in my life, I still thought “make things better” meant “make more money.” I’ve written extensively about my spiritual journey on this blog, so I won’t go into detail here. But while my struggle with actual depression was relatively short, I didn’t start feeling good until I accepted that what I really wanted wasn’t financial, it was spiritual… but that wasn’t what our mainstream society told me I was supposed to want.
I have mildly autistic friends who say “I don’t want a cure, I want you to accept me as I am.”
Less conformity, more respect
I believe our (you, me, other ordinary people – not necessarily psychologists, but maybe them too) definition of mental illness is far too broad, and our understanding of ordinary human emotions and behavior is far too narrow. Our mainstream society has far too many expectations for conformity and not nearly enough respect for personal boundaries.
What if the Orlando shooter had grown up in a society that understood and accepted that different people have different sexual orientations, and different is good? There is evidence he was struggling with his own same sex attraction – what if his culture (his American culture – he was born and lived his entire life in the US) and his religion had affirmed that as OK? We need to reduce our demands for conformity.
What if we taught young men that while it’s perfectly normal to be attracted to women, the only way they have a right to approach women is the same way they approach men: as people and as individuals who like what they like and want what they want. What if we taught young men to value women’s sovereignty and boundaries more than their potential to be a sex partner? We need to increase our respect for personal boundaries.
And then since we wouldn’t be describing ordinary human behavior as mental illness, we could do a better job of identifying and treating real medical conditions and helping those who have been harmed by toxic individuals and circumstances (which, sadly, we will never completely eliminate).
Amateur psychoanalysis from 50,000 feet usually isn’t helpful
You don’t need a counseling license to see that some people who do terrible things are genuinely mentally ill. But simply saying “he’s mentally ill” doesn’t tell us anything particularly useful. Mental illness is a broad category of many conditions, and the vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent or dangerous in any way. Mostly, calling someone mentally ill is a way of distancing ourselves from them, a distance that’s not always justified and that keeps us from looking for deeper reasons why people do really bad things.
As always, reality is much more complicated than we like to pretend it is.
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