Prejudice after mass shootings is a well-defined pattern

Alternate Title: This autistic with mental health disabilities would like others to develop better pattern recognition skills.

Image text:
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? 
-From T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” Part II: East Coker

I have an inordinate fondness of T.S. Eliot’s poetry. I have significantly less fondness of repeatedly having to tell people to stop blaming mental health for mass shootings. But yes, I shall say it again. Because a 2017 Georgetown Public Policy Review article by Delaney Luna notes that “a 2015 study found that 63% of Americans blame untreated mental health problems for mass shootings.” Because “contentious studies associating mental disorders with violence are often cited as fact, overstating the propensity for mentally ill individuals to commit violent acts, and promoting these ideas to the American public.”

(Unfortunately, often gun control legislation introduced in the wake of shootings targets disabled people. There is clearly a mass shooting problem, but any solutions need to be non-biased and not ableist. The public policy article does set up the dichotomy of blaming mental health vs. gun control, so keep the above in mind).

So yes, I shall say it again. Stop scapegoating social minorities – people with mental health disabilities – and evading the real problems. There are patterns to how people respond to these incidents, and patterns behind the motivations of perpetrators.

Fact: There is usually a history of things like domestic violence or white nationalist supremacy discovered in the backgrounds of those who commit mass shootings. Response: Many people, including government policymakers, decline to do anything but blame terrorism (predominantly if the perpetrator is or thought to be brown and Muslim), or mental health (predominantly if the perpetrator is white). It is still apparently easier for many people reporting news coverage, or policymakers, and others to deny these patterns. They believe it is better to scapegoat than get at the real problems… better to try and stop us from having rights.

The discussion for the most recent incident in Parkland, Florida revolves around mental health. There’s also talk of white nationalist ties. Which, great, please talk about white nationalism being one of the factors involved. White nationalism – as recorded by the Southern Poverty Law Center – has a body count even as its proponents play respectability politics in some arenas. But some coverage is talking about white nationalism – and mental health – in the same conversation, and it needs to stop. One Tumblr user puts it well in their post “Extremism is not a function of mental illness.”

Most extremists are average people in a socially vulnerable position that extremist ideologues can exploit. People who feel disenfranchised (legitimately or not.) People who are socially isolated. People who are scared, or angry, or feel cheated.

This isn’t mental illness: this is a social problem.

This is exactly what happens every time social change comes to a head.

It becomes violent when someone feeling threatened by the changes decides it’s time to put the social change back the way it “should be.” It becomes violent because these people are told by their extremist social group that the world is getting out of line because they haven’t stopped it.

Stop saying, directly or indirectly, that only people with mental health disabilities can be responsible for atrocities and violence. We are not, in fact, more likely to be the perpetrators of such violence. Luna notes in the Public Policy Review article that “only about 3 to 5% of all US crimes are committed by individuals diagnosed with a mental illness, and fewer than 5% of all gun-related killings between 2001 and 2010 were committed by individuals with diagnosed mental illnesses.”

Stop saying it when most of us are engaged in such a struggle to survive already. Fun fact: I just got out of a psych ward again within the last few weeks. Surviving is hard.

[Partial screencap of diagnoses from my most recent hospital stay, including autism spectrum, suicidal ideation, and bipolar disorder – unspecified. Name of hospital and dates removed.]

Stop saying extremism and its resulting violence is the result of mental health disability. Stop tying mental health disability to white nationalism, the way that’s being done now after mass shootings and whenever the Trump administration does something terrible and/or linked to white nationalism.

So yes, I shall say it again: Stop trying to tie mental health disability to all the occurrences you pretend are unexplainable by anything else.

We’re already dealing with enough without scapegoating being pushed as “mental health reform” and being blamed for social problems that are explained by multiple other factors. We already know you don’t actually want to help us – just protect people from us, but it sure would be nice if you could at least stop making life harder for us.

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Note

Conversations on mass shootings do shift with context, and it’s important to note mental health isn’t the only topic of conversation. If the perpetrator was brown and Muslim, Islamophobia comes into play as a prejudice:

• Media coverage exacerbates prejudices and Islamophobia. From the 2017 Georgetown Public Policy Review article on the media and mass shootings.
• For a less policy-focused perspective, Aymann Ismail wrote for Slate in 2017 about being Muslim and reacting to mass shootings.