Mentally ill are scapegoats in Newtown’s aftermath
Once again, the mentally ill are taking the rap. In the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings — as in the wake of so many other such incidents in the U.S. — the talk is all about mental illness.
None of those who utter these broad pronouncements state which mental illness needs extra attention so as to prevent its sufferers from grabbing assault weapons and heading for the nearest school, theatre or shopping centre. So they just lump everything under that convenient general heading of “mental illness.”
Yet Medical News Today reports “The DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the U.S. standard reference for psychiatry, includes over 300 different manifestations of mental illness.” Which ones are these pontificators talking about?
None of these glib people personally knew Adam Lanza, the Newtown killer, or had even heard of him before the shooting. They do not have access to his medical files, and they have no clue as to whether he was indeed mentally ill.
As Melody Moezzi mused in the Huffington Post this past week: “Why does the public immediately assume that anyone who commits a senseless act of violence must be mentally ill?”
Moezzi, who has bipolar disorder, points out that in spite of her struggles with mental illness, she has never hurt or killed anyone. In fact, she says, “those of us living with mental illness are no more likely to commit violent crimes than our so-called ‘normal’ counterparts.” Yet the actions of someone like Adam Lanza, who might or might not have been mentally ill, teach people to fear those with mental illness, regardless of their particular diagnosis.
Recently, a local mental health professional told me that except in rare cases, mental illness does not alter people’s morals and values.
He said schizophrenics especially are often assumed to be prone to violence, but the fact is they are turned inward, living inside their heads, not interested in lashing out at other people.
Dan Delaloye, executive director of the Calgary chapter of the Canadian Mental Health Association, concurs with that assessment.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Delaloye said in a telephone interview. “One in five people will suffer some sort of mental illness in their lifetime. It might be anything from depression to a more significant mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.”
Delaloye added that research has shown “people with mental illness are actually less violent than the normal society.”
If Lanza suffered from severe mental illness, it wouldn’t have emerged overnight. “I can’t speak to Newtown. We don’t know the circumstances. The media have talked about this individual suffering from mental illness. (But) these kinds of things, those signs, would have been there for most of that person’s life,” Delaloye said. “That’s why it’s so important to address the stigma associated with mental illness and get the care.”
He said that up to 70 per cent of people with mental illness don’t get treatment.
The stigma only gets worse, when the mentally ill see their conditions casually tossed around as the source of evil. For example, Silvia Casabianca, described as a doctor, reiki master, qigong practitioner and holistic psychotherapist, posits in an online article titled “Adam Lanza: Possible mental health profile of a mass killer,” that he might have had Asperger’s, anti-social personality disorder or schizoid personality disorder. She concludes that “most likely, Adam could have been a case classified as a disorder ‘Not Otherwise Specified (NOS),’ applied to cases that don’t fit other categories.” Well, that’s been helpful, hasn’t it?
Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at the State University of New York-Stony Brook, writes on CNN: “We still know nothing about (Lanza’s) motives, only the devastating carnage he wrought. And yet we’ve already heard from experts who talk about mental illness, Asperger’s syndrome, depression and autism.”
Everyone is trying to apply some order to Newtown, to pigeonhole it in some way, because a neat label helps make it all go away.
Rabbi Naomi Levy tackles a similar theme in her book To Begin Again: The Journey Toward Comfort, Strength and Faith in Difficult Times, when she talks about how people use self-blame to ascribe a cause to a tragedy. “It creates order out of chaos. It gives us a way to retain the belief that the tragedy that has befallen ... is not just haphazard, is not just senseless ... It allows us to feel powerful in the face of a tragedy that leaves us feeling helpless and small.”
That is exactly what scapegoating the mentally ill does for tragedies like Newtown — it creates order out of chaos. It seems to be too much to admit that someone might be simultaneously sane and just plain evil.
“There’s just this stigma associated with mental illness, that’s not associated with the rest of society,” Delaloye said. “It’s so wrong.”
It means that people who are already ill and hurting end up being more hurt and stigmatized so others can make themselves feel better.