Ignoring mental illness won’t make it go away
Ironically, I was sitting in a meeting about mental health on my campus at the University of Texas at San Antonio when the first texts came in about the recent horrific attack at UT-Austin — four students stabbed, one fatally, outside their campus gym. And just two days later, in Dallas, there was a murder-suicide on a community college campus. In both cases, news accounts mentioned mental illness.
These types of tragedies create particular challenges for clinical professionals. On one hand, we want people to recognize and respond appropriately to signs of mental distress. On the other, we need people to realize that the majority of violent crimes are NOT committed by people who are mentally ill. In reality, less than 5 percent of violent acts are actually committed by people suffering from mental illness. This is noteworthy given that the National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that 1 in 5 Americans will experience mental illness in a given year.
Nevertheless, the stigmas are so strong that for many people words like mental illness and counseling connote images of irrational, embarrassing, “crazy” behavior. And yet the truth is that the most common forms of mental illness — depression and anxiety — are ubiquitous and touch all of our lives. Even schizophrenia, which is characterized by periods of disordered thought and behavior, occurs in 1 percent of the population, meaning that we have all encountered people with schizophrenia, and perhaps not even known it. Clearly, the misperceptions, stigma and silence around mental illness continue to impede our efforts to provide support and treatment for people in distress.
Important to educate ourselves
This problem stems from the fact that we intuitively want to believe that we can control our own behavior and therefore are justified in holding all people responsible for their actions. However, many forms of mental illness are characterized by disruptions in thoughts, emotions and behaviors that the individual may not be able to recognize or control on their own.
Also, mental illness is not a binary construct in that you are either ill or you are fine. As with physical illness, the causes reflect a complex interaction of genetic, biological and environmental factors and there are variations across diagnoses and individuals. While we wouldn’t expect a person with diabetes to manage their condition with willpower, we still tend to think that people should be able to change their mental state if they want to.
So how are we to respond to violent campus crimes that may have involved mental illness? The first step is to start talking about the issue and to take action to educate ourselves and others about mental illness.
Why is it that K-12 students learn more about the moon and the tides than they do about how their own brain works? Why do we act as though seeking psychological help through counseling should be a closely guarded secret? Where is the funding for research on more effectively treating mental illness? Mental illness, like physical illness, has both biological and experiential components. But if we are going to treat it, we have to talk about it.
As individuals, we also need to be sensitive to signs of distress in the people around us and be willing to offer them support and help finding treatment. When we see signs of harmful thoughts or behaviors either in person or through other sources such as social media, we need to speak up.
Utilize the help that’s there
You don’t have to be a paramedic to call for help at an accident, and the same applies to helping people in psychological distress. Most college campuses have counseling and health services, and many have teams that respond to reports of distress in students, staff and faculty. We need to utilize these services more frequently.
Most important, we have to stop thinking that if we just ignore the problem, it will go away. As a society, we need to start believing — and acting — as though mental health matters.