Mental Illness is in the News Again!

There's a whole lot of talk about how we deal with/see mental illness, especially in children, because of this latest school shooting in the news.

Let me make a suggestion. Maybe we should consider the many stigma around seeking mental health care and the fact that we produce so many people who turn to violence are related in more ways than they're not. It's not as simple as just saying "people who need access to mental health care should have it, people who show worrying signs should be forced to seek mental health care... blah, blah, blah," which is what we always do. It's reductive, and people who have mental health issues aren't automatically more prone to violence, though I would be the first to say a person who turns to randomized violence is not in a healthy state of mind. Statistically though, we're more likely to be victims of violence than we are to be the perpetrators. 

It stings a bit to see this conversation so regularly, to be honest. It's yet another way that demonstrates how mental illness is seen as a burden. It's never that putting a real value on mental health is probably a good idea or that people with mental illnesses who aren't out committing random violence would most likely do everything with any amount of power given them to mitigate their symptoms and just have some peace and that the creating a culture where mental health has genuine value would also mean people with worrying signs would have better access to care. It's important because it's intruded on everyone else, in a frightening way, even as the things like rates of poverty, life expectancy, co-occurring medical health issues etc. are what they are for people with mental illnesses. Those aren't "BIG IMPORTANT TOPIC" things. They don't generally have dramatic outcomes. A shocking number of us just spend our lives in poverty and die early, quietly, because interrupting is indecent and impolite and we're asking to be given special treatment if we interrupt the norm. The normies got scared though, so it's time to trot out all the trite talk. It's never that with the right access to care and what a wider definition of the value of labor might mean for people with mental illnesses and our ability to be more than a boogeyman or a burden. It's always about how scared everyone is of people with mental illnesses, and how they think the problem we are needs to be dealt with. 

This might seem a little sarcastic or a little harsh. If it seems that way, be grateful, because you don't have to regularly contend with the fact that one of the most defining characteristics of who you are is reduced to being either burden or boogeyman. I'll move on though, because there are other, equally important things to consider.  

We aren't a country/society/nation/culture which believes mental health is a valuable asset, even among those who don't have a severe, chronic mental illness. We just don't really care. As long as you can make the widgets and you don't make people uncomfortable, you're mental health doesn't matter. The only time your mental health matters is when you can't make the widgets or you're making people uncomfortable, and those things are almost the same thing in a practical sense. Half of the culture of making widgets and celebrating people who make widgets well is based in ideas and attitudes which are in no way conducive to mental health, and we'll excuse and celebrate them if the widgets are being made well. The better the widget and the better the rewards for the widget, the more we'll excuse.

We're also invested in the threat of violence as a necessary tool to shape behavior, and we have a tolerance for the threat of violence as a method of communication in a way that is anything but rational if violence is something you genuinely want to avoid. We also devalue the health and well being of human beings by conflating property damage with violence. It's a societal act of dehumanization to do so. Broken things can be fixed or replaced, not all broken people can be fixed and none can be replaced, and the number of people in this country who have been broken by violence should be unacceptable, but it would mean thinking and being genuinely considered in how we start to approach changing our ideas and attitudes about violence.

There's an interesting thing about living with a fear of violence which seems to be elevated or at least conscious in a way which isn't shared by the majority of people around you, it starts to become clear how often people are acting on their own fear of violence in a way they are completely unaware of, and how much it shapes so much of who so many of us are. It's so deeply ingrained we recognize it as entire personalities. It effects so many of the decisions and attitudes which are in no way defined as related to mental illness, yet they are also in no way healthy. The fear of violence provokes violence, which instills new or further fear of violence and on and on and on... Maybe it's not necessarily mental illness which is at the core of our collective ideas and attitudes about violence, but it's certainly not mental health either. 

Maybe we're all attempting to survive and figure out how to live in a way which is not at all conducive to anything like mental health, and a big, big part of that is how normalized these attitudes toward violence, with our fears about it being part of that. Maybe we'd get more and better widgets if we started looking at what it would mean to live in a way which was conducive to healthy, fulfilled lives as the point of something like a nation, and not whether or not we have the capacity to violently enforce our will on anyone, anywhere in the world as means of measuring power. Maybe power isn't a measure of greatness. Maybe there is no greatness.

One of my grandfather's used to tell these stories about his experience growing up. He'd tell them with joviality and laughter. They were endearing, in his way of seeing it. I grew up hearing them, so I tried to take them the same way, though they always made me kind of uncomfortable. I was often uncomfortable though, in part because being a kid is uncomfortable a lot of the time, and I was also dealing with a lot of my own stuff.

I was probably 12 or 13, when one night a group of us were sitting around after dinner and he was going through these stories, yet again. We all knew the drill. We laughed when we were supposed to, we nodded or shook our heads when we were supposed to.

My stepmother was new to the family. I'm not sure she had even married my dad yet. My grandfather had regaled us with these tales for a while, and at one point she said, "But... You know that's not normal, right?"  These were tales that came down to violence and abuse, when you stepped back. He had no idea what to say to that, because it was normal to him. I was dumbstruck, because it was a recognition of what made me uncomfortable about this particular ritual. To him, it was nostalgia. These were expressions of love and concern in his mind. It recalled his youth, a lot of which he had warm memories for. It was also horrifying in many ways, but I hadn't put that together, because our family just had a ritual around it. It was the moment I came to understand what had seemed like contradictions in who he was which had been impossible to reconcile. That ritual was normal to me, until it wasn't. I probably won't ever forget that moment, for the rest of my life.

I loved him and he loved me, but I wouldn't call him a well person. I'm about 99% sure the majority of that unwellness, and the damage it did to him and other people in our family, came down to those experiences of violence and abuse, the fear it instilled in him, and the fact that all of that was what seemed normal for him and a whole lot of his generation and the people in the world he lived in. We can say, "Well it was his responsibility to get help." There's A LOT of truth in that. It's also true that the opportunities for him to realize "maybe I need help" were very few and very far between, because all of it was so normalized in so much of the world he existed in. When you don't rub up against something different with any regularity, it's easy for it to seem like this is just something inherent to the human condition. "I'm not happy. I'm angry all the time. I'm worried all the time." These aren't things we look at as needing to seek some kind of mental health assistance for, more often than not. "This is just the same crazy we all are." These are things we tell ourselves we just need to get through or we need to toughen up. They have a cumulative effect though. Next thing you know, it's years of just getting through, and it's changed how you act and react in the world, but it never dawned on you, because you were just getting through.

We're all so busy keeping the lights on and our bellies full, the rest of it is just impossible to keep up with most of the time, much less to stop and have a real discussion with ourselves about how much of what our world is incompatible with our well being. We can see the big shining, flashing warnings like just never being able to make enough money, whether it's enough to survive or enough to not be interested in making more. It's this other stuff though, the ideas and attitudes we have about violence, which are both much harder to suss out, but are very often fundamental to how we decide to create and conduct ourselves.

What's the point of having norms if they aren't helping bring about better health and are hindering the recognition that our relationship to violence is a direct threat to our health?